Monday, April 16, 2007
Abstinence Education Not So Smart
filed under: Strange Bedfellows, State of Sex Ed by Lux Nightmare
It should come as no surprise that we at Sexerati aren’t big fans of abstinence only education (it’s hard to fit statements like ‘touching another person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy”‘ and “half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus” under the banner of smart sex) — so it was nice to see the Associated Press reporting that a new study has shown that abstinence-only education doesn’t work.
Which is to say: students who attended abstinence-only education classes were just as likely to have sex as their peers who didn’t attend the classes. And have about the same number of partners. And lose their virginity at about the same age.
Not surprisingly, supporters of abstinence-only education (like, say, the Bush administration) aren’t willing to abandon ship in the face of this study, pointing out that the four programs involved in the study were early, unrefined examples of abstinence-only education, and that later programs have perfected the strategy of, uh, scaring kids out of having sex by lying to them.
Well, maybe. Or maybe we should just throw our money to programs that have actually been scientifically proven to work.
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