Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds

This from the Washington Post, Photo by Jonathan Dyer of the Hilton Head Island Packet:

Teenagers Who Make Such Promises

Are Just as Likely to Have Sex,

and Less Likely to Use Protection, the Data Indicate

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking." ...

Abstinence? Sure. Until something better comes along.

This from MSNBC, Photo by Mike Kemp/Getty Images:

Abstinence?

From what?

For how long?

Teens and adults have murky, conflicting definitions when it comes to not having sex.

If you already worry about the way your teenager can swing wildly from one viewpoint to another, you probably don't want to hear this. “Kids can believe in abstinence, but also intend to have sex,” said N. Tatiana Masters, a social scientist at the University of Washington and author of a new study on teens' contradictory attitudes about abstinence and sex.

The research, published in the current issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, shows that adolescents and teens often hold seemingly irreconcilable ideas about having sex, confounding the abstinence-only sex education message supported by over a billion dollars of federal funding. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence eroding confidence in abstinence-only sex education.

Roughly $1.5 billion in federal grants to state education authorities have been distributed to finance abstinence-only curricula since the Clinton administration. But some states, like California, Wisconsin and Ohio, have stopped accepting the grants because the money is tied to a mandated abstinence-only message that studies have shown to be largely ineffective...

Students of Virginity

This from the New York Times:

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs.

It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.”

They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already.

At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

Janie Fredell, an advocate of premarital abstinence, says that "virginity is extremely alluring."

And then Fredell arrived at Harvard. Sitting in a Cambridge restaurant not long ago, she told me that people back home called it “godless, liberal Harvard.” Some discouraged her from going, but Fredell went anyway, arriving in the fall of 2005. She wanted to study government, she said, maybe become a lawyer, and she knew that “people take you more seriously as a Harvard student.”

From the start, she told me, she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas. There were so many different kinds of people at Harvard, most of them trying to change the world, and everyone trying to figure out what they thought of everyone else. “Harvard really puts pressure on you to define who you are,” Fredell said, and she loved everything about Harvard, except the sex.

Sex, as she put it, was not even “anything I’d ever thought about” when, as a freshman, she was educated in safe-sex practices. What she was told was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called “Empowering You”: “put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.”

Fredell began to understand she was in “a culture that says sex is totally O.K.” When a new boyfriend came to her, expressing desire, she managed to “stick to my guns,” she said, but there were “uncouth and socially inept” men, as she considered them, all around, and observing the rituals of her new classmates, Fredell couldn’t help being alarmed. “The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing,” she said. “It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!” ...

Photo: Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times.

States Turn Down Abstinence-Only Grants

Education Week reports:

The federal government is trying to bolster support for its abstinence-until-marriage state-grant program, which officials contend is under attack by interest groups misrepresenting its intent.

The Administration for Children and Families, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sent a memorandum last week to state agencies saying they are allowed to use other federal dollars to provide comprehensive sex education if they choose.

“The State Abstinence Education Grant program does not force an ‘either-or’ decision for how states approach teen-pregnancy prevention,” said the March 19 memo. The grant program has received $50 million a year since its inception in 1997. The money is given to states, which are required to partially match the funds and then distribute the money to various public and private agencies.

Days before the government sent out its guidance, Ohio released a budget March 15 indicating it is joining other states—Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—in rejecting the federal money under the state-grant program...

...The federal abstinence program has come under scrutiny recently. In a report released late last year, the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, said that HHS was not reviewing abstinence education programs for scientific accuracy. ("Abstinence Programs Lack Factual Reviews, GAO Study Concludes," Education Week, Nov. 29, 2006.)

A legal opinion from the general counsel of the GAO also said abstinence programs must include “medically accurate” information about condoms or risk violating federal law. The Health and Human Services Department responded that the programs are not required to talk about condom usage, but present accurate information about condoms when they do so. ("GAO Opinion Renews Debate on Abstinence-Only Programs," Education Week, Nov. 1, 2006.)