Thursday, October 4, 2012

Dollars for Ignorance: Federal Funding and Abstinence-Only Sex Ed.


Continuing with my theme of issues relating to girls in public secondary schools, I’d did some research this week on sex education. I chose to specifically consider abstinence-only sex ed, and the effects it has been found to have on teendaged girls’ sexual and reproductive health.


Federal guidance requires all programs to adhere to an eight-point definition of abstinence-only education and prohibits programs from disseminating information on contraceptive services, sexual orientation and gender identity, and other aspects of human sexuality.”

This quote if from an article in the scholarly journal Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology titled, “Abstinence and Abstinence-Only Education.” The article also states that this type of sexual education is the only form currently funded by the federal government. In the first decade of the 21st century, the US federal government spent approximately $178 million per year funding such programs. Curricula for these programs “must have as their ‘exclusive purpose’ the promotion of abstinence outside of marriage and may not in any way advocate contraceptive use or discuss contraceptive methods or condoms except to emphasize their failure rates.”

So, with a forced ignorance built into the mechanisms for disseminating information about teenagers’ sexual and reproductive health, how is this affected?

An article in the HuffingtonPost reports that, “Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, has the nation's highest teen pregnancy rate. Yet until this year, the state allowed schools to forgo sex education entirely.” This statement highlights two important considerations surrounding this issue: 1.) that a correlation exists between missing or incomplete sexual education and high teen pregnancy rates, 2.) the trend is aggravated by variables such as poverty.

The maps below illustrate the correlation between states’ acceptance of federal funding for Abstinence-Only sex ed. In the top map, the orange states have refused such funding while the gray states have accepted it. The map below illustrates teen pregnancy rates throughout the US. You’ll notice that states which allow for federally funded sex ed programs, particularly those clustered in the south, also boast the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rates. Conversely states concentrated in the north and west have lower teen pregnancy rates and have rejected federal funds for abstinence only sex ed. in favor of more comprehensive forms of information.





In addition to the ineffectiveness of this type of information, the authors of the article in COOG also claim that the implementation of this type of sexual health curricula is widely unpopular. They conducted a nationwide survey that found “81% of adults believed that sex education teaching both abstinence and other methods to prevent pregnancy to be (most) effective. The same survey found that 51% of adults opposed abstinence-only, whereas only 10% opposed teaching contraception and condom use.”

So why is an ineffective and unpopular policy which adversely affects the health of young people receiving such dramatic sums of public money?

It is a question for our nation’s elected legislators and the interests which back them, yet I doubt it will soon be answered.

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