Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Movement Loses Ground

Today, SIECUS is pleased to release the Fiscal Year 2007 SIECUS State Profiles: A Portrait of Sexuality Education and Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs in the States. This document, the largest and most comprehensive that SIECUS produces each year, provides a profile of each individual state and the District of Columbia. It includes the most recent data on where federal abstinence-only-until-marriage dollars are being spent and important Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Study (YRBSS) statistics that were released in June of this year. This is the fifth annual edition of the State Profiles, and, after half a decade, I thought it was a good opportunity to look back on how far we have come.

As recently as Fiscal Year 2003, the first year of the Profiles, we were dealing with a very different situation. Federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs had ballooned almost 100 percent since 2000 to a whopping $117 million dollars. At the same time, only one state, California, was refusing Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage funds. But the present portrait is very different. State and national partners across the country have held the line on funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs and they have received the same amount of federal money for the past four years. Given two of these were Republican-led Congresses, flat funding has been no small feat and underscores the precarious future of these programs.

Also, 24 other states have since joined California in refusing Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage funding. The great gains that the abstinence-only-until-marriage industry made in the late 90s and early 2000s have been, to a large degree, halted in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and common sense.

The news is not all good, however.

The amount of federal funding that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs receive each year comes in at a staggering $176 million, totaling over $1.5 billion spent since funding began in 1982. One hundred and thirteen million dollars of these annual funds are coming from federal Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) grants. While much attention is made in the news about important and systemic progress made in states refusing Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage funds, it is important to remember that it is money from CBAE grants that makes up the vast majority of federal-abstinence-only-until marriage funding, and that CBAE funds go directly to local and community organizations, without any regulation by the states. The State Profiles detail where every one of those CBAE dollars went and reviews some of the worst programs they supported.

The real victims in this situation continue to be the young people who are receiving misleading, biased, or false information through tax-payer funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, and who have missed the opportunity to receive good, comprehensive sex education. The teen birth rate is up 3 percent nationally, the first time in 15 years that we have seen any increase, and one in four teenage girls is infected with an STD. New estimates of HIV incidence are a national shame and substantiate the jettisoning of evidence-based prevention strategies in favor of the failed abstinence-only-until-marriage approach. Additionally, communities made vulnerable to poor health outcomes, including racial and ethnic minorities, continue to suffer from the highest and most disproportional rates of STDs and unintended pregnancy. Many communities and states in the South also trail the nation in vital health statistics, and it is there that the majority of federal abstinence-only dollars, nearly $85 million annually, goes. It is time that we put our resources toward solving these problems and reversing these trends, rather than continuing to throw good money after bad by supporting failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.