As parents, school boards, policy makers, etc. Unfortunately, the danger with these programs is that in the end, little or no emphasis is placed on encouraging students to abstain from sexual activity. Instead, a significant number of these programs heavily endorse condom use and condone sexual activity among teens, and simply give a mention of abstinence as one choice among many.
Nearly all such programs contain material and messages that would be offensive and alarming to the majority of parents. There is a great need for our teens to receive good information about sexual behavior, and receive it in a way that allows them to make good choices. In a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , The percentage of high school students who have had sex decreased 16 percent between and Teen pregnancy rates among teens aged also decreased 38 percent between and according to The National Campaign to Prevent Teen an Unplanned Pregnancy.
Abstinence Education can help continue this downward trend to give our children a chance to grow up and mature before engaging in sexual activity. Schools will always struggle to find the right balance when dealing with sex education. There will always be strong voices on each side of the issue trying to persuade us that their side is the right one.
Parents have a tremendous opportunity if they will be vocal and upfront as they discuss expectations and acceptable actions with their children. United Families supports Abstinence-only Education to help families as they confront a culture that has become extremely sexualized.
To study current U. They report that a rapidly rising age of first marriage has translated to shrinking numbers of young people who abstain from sex before getting married. In the U. Abstinence-only-until-marriage approaches have set back sex education, family planning, and HIV-prevention efforts.
Between and , the percentage of schools in the U. In , 81 percent of adolescent males and 87 percent of adolescent females reported receiving formal instruction about birth control methods; by , only 55 percent of young men and 60 percent of young women said the same. Fact sheet examines abstinence education programs, funding and impact on teen sexual behavior. There are two main approaches towards sex education: abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education Table 1.
These categories are broad, and the content, methods, and targeted populations can vary widely between programs within each model. They generally do not discuss contraceptive methods or condoms unless to emphasize their failure rates. Comprehensive sex education is more diversely defined. Most generally, these programs include medically accurate, evidence-based information about both contraception and abstinence, as well as condoms to prevent STI transmission.
Other programs emphasize safe-sex practices and often include information about healthy relationships and lifestyles. The type of sex education model used can vary by school district, and even by school.
Some states have enacted laws that offer broad guidelines around sex education, though most have no requirement that sex education be taught at all. Only 24 states and DC require that sex education be taught in schools Text Box 1. More often, states enact laws that dictate the type of information included in sex education if it is taught, leaving up to school districts, and sometimes the individual school, whether to require sex education and which curriculum to use.
Since then, abstinence education curricula have evolved and federal financial support has fluctuated with each administration, peaking in at the end of the Bush Administration and then dropping significantly under the Obama administration. While these programs have since been eliminated and replaced by other sex education funding streams, the Title V AOUM program remains the largest source of federal funding for abstinence education today.
While not all eight points must be emphasized equally, AOUM programs cannot violate the intent of the A-H definition and may not discuss safer-sex practices or contraception except to emphasize their failure rates. States that accept Title V grant money must match every four federal dollars with three state dollars, and they distribute these funds through health departments to schools and community organizations. Every state, except California, has received funding from this program at some point, and currently half of states do.
Under the Obama Administration, there was a notable shift in abstinence education funding toward more evidence-based sex education initiatives. The current landscape of federal sex education programs is detailed in Table 2 and includes newer programs such as Personal Responsibility Education Program PREP , the first federal funding stream to provide grants to states in support of evidence-based sex education that teach about both abstinence and contraception.
In addition, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program TPPP was established to more narrowly focus on teen pregnancy prevention, providing grants to replicate evidence-based program models, as well as funding for implementation and rigorous evaluation of new and innovative models.
Nonetheless, support for abstinence education programs continues. Nine organizations sued in Washington, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, arguing that their grants were wrongfully terminated.
Federal judges in each of the four lawsuits ruled in favor of the organizations, allowing the programs to continue until the end of their grant cycle in At the same time, the Trump Administration announced the availability of new funding for the TPP program with updated guidelines.
These new rules require grantees to replicate one of two abstinence programs—one that follows a sexual risk avoidance model, and one that follows a sexual risk reduction model— in order to receive funding. This marks a sharp departure from the rules under the Obama administration, which allowed grantees to choose from a list of 44 evidence-supported programs that vary by approach, target population, setting, length, and intended outcomes. In , a nine-year congressionally mandated study that followed four of the programs during the implementation of the Title V AOUM program found that abstinence-only education had no effect on the sexual behavior of youth.
Among those who did have sex, there was no difference in the mean age at first sexual encounter or the number of sexual partners between the two groups.
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