Reason & Information, not Morality Lessons, Impact Abstinence-Only Results

via Flickr’s Nigel TommResearchers have positive results in a new study on abstinence-sex education classes, findings that are certain to be misquoted.

I’ve moved this story from the Daily News front page to Body-Politics, because it’s paragraph 14 in the Washington Post, before we find the information that counts.

The inability of the Post to quote the relevant facts front and center underscores just how the essence will be misrepresented in this new research. The quotes of ‘I told you so’ preceed the facts of the research. Had I not read the particulars in Reuters last evening, I wouldn’t read to paragraph 14, looking for the facts. Amazing!

Moving away from traditional abstinence only programs that have failed, the Obama administration is launching a new pregnancy prevention initiative that has scientific evidence it works.

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

The approach is not based on morality or delaying sex until marriage, but on reason and information to young people advising them to delay sex until they are ready.

The findings are important because after falling for more than a decade, the numbers of births, pregnancies and STDs among US teens has begun rising. 

Several critics of an abstinence-only approach said that the curriculum tested did not represent most abstinence programs. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms.

“There is no data in this study to support the ‘abstain until marriage’ programs, which research proved ineffective during the Bush administration,” said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth.

The actual research involved 662 African American students from four public middle schools in a city in the Northeastern United States and was conducted between 2001 and 2004.

Students were randomly assigned to go through one of the following: an eight-hour curriculum that encouraged them to delay having sex; an eight-hour program focused on teaching safe sex; an eight- or 12-hour program that did both; or an eight-hour program focused on teaching them other ways to be healthy, such as eating well and exercising. The abstinence-only portion involved a series of sessions in which instructors talked to students in small groups about their views about abstinence and their knowledge of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. They also conducted role-playing exercises and brainstorming sessions designed to correct misconceptions about sex and sexually transmitted diseases, encourage abstinence and offer ways to resist pressure to have sex.

Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

The abstinence program had no negative effects on condom use, which has been a major criticism of the abstinence approach, which disallows any discussion of condoms. via Washington Post