Abstinence-only Education

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 4, 2007

It is almost unheard of that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, especially during times of pressing budgetary concerns, would turn down free money. Yet that is precisely what Governor Deval Patrick's administration intends to do with the annual $700,000 federal abstinence education grant that our state has been receiving since 1998.

The public reason given by the administration is that a recent government-sponsored study shows that abstinence-only sexual education programs do not work, which is an outrageous caricature of a report published last month about only four of 900 abstinence programs nationwide. The real reason appears to be that the members of the administration do not seem to want abstinence education taught to young people.

We first start with last month's study by Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, New Jersey, which has been seized upon by abstinence education opponents as proof that such programs are ineffectual. Mathematica investigated four abstinence-only education programs and concluded that students in them, five years after the programs ended, do not abstain from sexual activity any more than non-participating peers.

The authors of the 164-page study did not conclude, however, that abstinence education does not work, but only that these four programs studied showed no noticeable impact. Based on their analysis, they gave two reasons why they thought the programs did not achieve the results they were intended to achieve. First, they noted that the curricula were implemented only in elementary and middle school grades and stopped before the students entered high school. Secondly, they said that many of the participants' peer support systems had weakened or disappeared as the students had dispersed to various high schools. For both reasons, when students needed abstinence support the most — during their high school years — it was not there.

Critics of the study point out something else, to which the authors of the report, perhaps for reasons of political correctness, did not draw much attention. Three of the four programs studied serve predominantly minority populations where most of the children come from single parent homes. Minimally, they say, the study sample was not representative of the vast majority of communities served by the 900 abstinence-only educational programs nationwide, like most of those in the Commonwealth. At a deeper level, the students who received the training may have been at greater risk of teenage sexual activity, due to the much higher documented correspondence between teenage sexual activity and the lack of two parents, particularly a father, in the home.

So the upshot is two-fold: while these four programs were not successful in helping student participants maintain higher abstinence rates than non-participating peers five years after the instruction, these results cannot be legitimately extrapolated to the other 900 programs now in use in the country as if they do not work either. Studies of several of these other programs have shown that when abstinence education involves more than merely instruction in a middle school classrooms, but continues into high school, engages the support of students' families and communities, and encourages young people to make a pledge to remaining abstinent, the programs have great success in helping student participants, at much higher numbers than their peers, stay abstinent through their high school years and beyond.

If the members of the Patrick administration believed in the value of abstinence for young people, they should respond to the Mathematica report by asking what can be learned to ensure that abstinence-only programs in the Commonwealth are maximally effective, rather than jump to the false, unscientific and ideologically-motivated conclusion that all such programs do not work.

For example, we are all committed to eliminating teenage drug use. If a study showed, for example, that four drug-awareness programs were ineffective in persuading kids to say no to drugs, we would not conclude that all such programs are bound to fail and then voluntarily refuse federal grants for such education; rather, we would study ways to make the programs more effective, because we all agree on the value that students should not be doing drugs.

The last thing we would propose to do is to conduct a drug awareness program in which, at the same time we endeavor to persuade young people to say no to drugs and discuss why such behavior will be disastrous for them, we also aggressively promote the use of clean needles to try to minimize the damage of drug use. The more we would emphasize clean needles, the more students would conclude that we do not believe that they will heed our advice and have the self-control to do what is in their interest.

Yet that is precisely what the Patrick administration, and others, desire to be done with sex education. They support "comprehensive" programs in which students will hear something about abstinence, but then hear a lot about the use of condoms. While abstinence is the only real way that young people will fully avoid the consequences of sexual activity, the students also hear that condoms will protect them from pregnancy, AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. This is doubly problematic. First, condoms are not even close to 100% effective in preventing pregnancy, or AIDS, or various other types of venereal diseases, and they do not protect at all against human papilloma virus, which is the primary cause of cervical cancer. Secondly, by implying that condoms are sufficient "protection" against the risks of sexual activity, educators end up taking away one of the principal defenses — self preservation — young people have had to discipline their sexual urges. The result is that "comprehensive" programs end-up encouraging sexual activity, as two decades of studies have demonstrated.

Sometimes critics of abstinence-only education assert that if condoms are not encouraged, those children who choose not to remain abstinent will have sex without condoms and increase their risk of pregnancy and STDs. The Mathematica study showed that, while the four programs failed in achieving higher abstinence rates, the participating teenagers who engaged in sexual activity used condoms at the same rate as non-participating peers. The message about condoms is ubiquitous. So that objection is without merit.

The question for our commonwealth is to determine our end and means with regard to sex education. Do we want to encourage our young people to have sexual relations, albeit with condoms, or do we want to guide them away from adolescent sexual activity? Do we want teenagers to engage in sexual relations or not?

If we think that it is not in their interest to have sexually active lives at young age, then we should support abstinence-only education, persuade the Patrick administration to receive the federal money to underwrite such programs, and learn from the Mathematica report how to do it with greater effectiveness.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.