Planned Parenthood | Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

 

by Anna
Web Correspondent
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

When 76 members of Congress, 17 states, countless scientific groups, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all indicate that your policies are not working, you’d better at least pay attention.

It was 1996 when Congress signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act or “welfare reform” act into law. The Act included a provision securing $250 million in federal funding to states whose sex education programs promoted abstinence until marriage. Later this provision became Section 510(b) of the Title V Social Security Act, and it has been notorious among comprehensive sex education supporters ever since. Last year, Congress extended the legislation despite the fact that states which had adopted the policy had yet to release reports indicating any benefits.

Recently, however, a stronger barrage of criticism than ever has hit Title V, and its various issuers demonstrate a show of solidarity that just might give abstinence-only funding the boot (or so we can hope).

Last November, John Santelli of Columbia University and nine other important researchers in the fields of adolescent sexual and reproductive health wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urging them to take action against funding for abstinence programs. In the letter, the scientists cite numerous studies indicating that abstinence-only programming is not effective. Virginity pledging, they say, rarely stops students from having sex before marriage, and virginity pledgers are less likely than non-pledgers to practice safe sex when they do become sexually active. Furthermore, only about 3 percent of Americans actually remain sexually abstinent until marriage. This has been a stable trend during the second half of the twentieth century and remains unaffected by abstinence programs, rendering “no sex until marriage” an infeasible goal.

This month is virtually overflowing with evidence that people all over the country are getting restless with the federal government’s insistence on abstinence funding. At the beginning of the month, Iowa passed a bill proposed in the State House of Representatives last year rejecting Title V funding in favor of “scientifically based” comprehensive sex education, making it the 17th state to refuse the federal money.

Just days later, on March 11, the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that STD prevalence among young women has reached about one in four. This was another strong blow to abstinence-only supporters, who have claimed that simply telling teens not to have sex should stop the spread of STDs. In fact, lack of contraceptive and preventative information has done more harm than good.

On March 19, 76 members of Congress led by Jim Moran (D-Va.) sent a letter to David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, asking that abstinence education funding be removed from the Fiscal Year 2009 Labor, Health, and Human Services Appropriations Bill. The letter stated, “As you know, more than $1 billion has been spent on ‘abstinence-only’ programs in the last decade and annual funding for these programs now stands at an all-time high of $176 million…However, numerous reports have found that the ‘abstinence-only’ approach simply does not work.”

It’s great to see Congress officially acknowledging what so many people have been saying all along: Abstinence-only programs are unsuccessful and watching the federal government spend taxpayer money on them is upsetting, especially when comprehensive sex education has proved time and time again to be the more effective method. Here’s to hoping that the Congressional movement will grow in width and support and finally overthrow a policy that simply does not make sense.

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