by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(April 2, 2008) Dozens of pro-abortion Congressmen and women have sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey asking him to cut all abstinence education funding in FY 2009 in order to devote those dollars to what they call “more effective programs.”
Specifically, the lawmakers are calling for the de-funding of the Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) program, which received $141 million last year but only after a protracted and bitter battle on the Hill.
The mostly pro-abortion lawmakers complained that more than $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programs which some believe don’t work.
“Study after study has proven that abstinence-only education simply does not work and we cannot afford to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on programs that we know to be a failure,” their letter reads.
Experts could not disagree more and point to the numbers as proof that abstinence education works.
Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, points out that since the advent of abstinence education, there has been a 13 percent decrease in sexually active teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Their records also show that the unwed teen birthrate stabilized for the first time in 40 years in 1994 – the year Congress passed the first welfare reform bill that included funding for abstinence-only education for any state that requested it.
There is also plenty of proof that the “safe sex” programs these lawmakers support are the problem rather than the solution, they say. Evidence of this can be found in the recently released CDC report revealing a nationwide epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) among young girls. As many as one in four American teens is said to be infected with an STD.
Experts say the “safe sex” programs are the ones that should be defunded. Not only have these programs been found to do little or nothing to discourage early sexual activity among teens, they promote the use of condoms and other forms of contraception that offer only limited protection against STDs.
“A study in the American Journal of Health Behavior indicates that students in abstinence programs are 50 percent less likely to engage in sex,” writes Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America.
“In contrast, the longstanding comprehensive sex education program that prevails in most public schools was studied by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last year and found to have no impact on teens’ behavior.”
The younger a child is at the time of their sexual debut, the more partners they are likely to have in their lifetime, which is a major risk factor for contracting STDs. “Safe sex” programs, which received $417 million in federal funds last year, are supposed to teach both abstinence and contraceptive methods, but the HHS study found that all of the programs heavily emphasized contraception with little attention paid to abstinence. As a result, none of them had any impact on delaying sexual debut in children.
So why would lawmakers ask to cut abstinence funding?
Because “all the groups and the legislators are strong abortion proponents,” Crouse writes.
She correctly points out that nearly 200 liberal advocacy groups such as Planned Parenthood, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) which produces most of the nation’s sex ed curricula, continually lobby against abstinence education.
Planned Parenthood, one of the strongest advocates of “Comprehensive Sex” education devotes 40 percent of its business to contraception sales and another 30 percent from treating STD’s.
There are a lot of profits to be gained in teenage promiscuity.
“The more teens become sexually active, the more money Planned Parenthood and its advocates will make off of them,” said officials at Project Reality, a national adolescent health education association, in a March 27 press release.
“Whether it is from condom or contraception sales, or vaccines which promise that the teen will be ‘one less’ person affected by sexually transmitted diseases, ‘Comprehensive Sex’ educators are making a profit.”
They add: “It is not surprising that their distribution of choice is the public school system. By promoting sexual activity and then claiming to offer protection from the consequences, Planned Parenthood has truly created their own system of supply and demand; payment of choice being your tax dollars.”
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