There's one guaranteed way to never get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted infection: not having sex. In the 1990s, the United States government expanded efforts to fund programs that taught adolescents this fact. Unfortunately, that funding came with a few restrictions—most notably, the programs weren't allowed to promote or demonstrate any type of contraception whatsoever. This week, June and Josh try to figure out how these abstinence-only until marriage sex education initiatives got so much traction for so long.
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EPISODE ART: A graph from a report commissioned by the United States government to study the effectiveness of four abstinence-only sex education programs. There is no meaningful difference in outcomes between those who participated in the program and those who didn't.
SOURCES:
- "Budget Widens Teen-Pregnancy-Prevention Efforts" by Laura Meckler (The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2009)
- "Clinton Fires Surgeon General Over New Flap" by Paul Richter and Marlene Cimons (Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1994)
- History of Dedicated Federal Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs FY 1982-2019 from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
- "Context counts: Long‐term sequelae of premarital intercourse or abstinence" by Nicole M. Else-Quest, Janet Shibley Hyde & John D. DeLamater (The Journal of Sex Research, 2005)
- Full text of Section 510, the Separate Program for Abstinence Education
- "Whatever Happened to the Adolescent Family Life Act?" by Rebecca Saul (Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, 1998)
- "Clinton Frees $250 Million for Sex Abstinence Teaching" by Melissa Healy (Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1997)
- "Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Programs" report, published by HHS in 2007
- "Consequences of sex education on teen and young adult sexual behaviors and outcomes" by Laura Duberstein Lindberg & Isaac Maddow-Zimet (The Journal of Adolescent Health, 2012)
- "Funding for Abstinence-Only Education and Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: Does State Ideology Affect Outcomes?" by Ashley M Fox, Georgia Himmelstein, Hina Khalid & Elizabeth A. Howell (American Journal of Public Health, 2019)
- "Sex Education in Public Schools: Sexualization of Children and LGBT Indoctrination" by Cathy Ruse (Family Research Council, 2020)
- "The History of Federal Abstinence-Only Funding" fact sheet (Advocates for Youth, 2007)
- "Abstinence Education: Assessing the Evidence" by Christine C. Kim and Robert Rector (Heritage Foundation, 2008)
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