New Study Says Abstinence Education Does Infact Work

Maybe the reason 40 percent of teen girls who are sexually active have an STD is because all they were taught was to not have sex . Then when they accidently have sex they don't know how do it safely.

Safe sex is possible. Use a condom. Use birth control. Don't have se with people you meet on the street corner.

The government does not promote drug use or underage drinking because their illegal . Not because they are "high risk." It is not illegal to have sex.

In fact, this is not a study at all, but just a survey since the author states, "... abstinence education successfully reduced self-reported sexual involvement among African American students in grades six and seven."

Perhaps the kids who answered the questions just had more non-penetrative sex or even oral sex. Many kids don't think oral sex is considered sex. Also, I would be curious to see what groups they used for their "study". If they first asked impoverished students from Harlem about their sexual habits and then asked a middle-class group from San Francisco, obviously sexual expression would be reduced but that would most likely be according to their socioeconomic status.

This is throwaway science at best.

Given the number of states that opted not to accept federal funds for abstinence only sex education , one is led to wonder if the purported success of the program referred to by the FRC was because the participants had abnormally low sex drives or if the sample the study was based on was biased in other ways.

For the sake of argument, let's postulate that the study was accurate as far as it goes. Then one has to ask, when these people decide that abstinence is no longer desirable, will they be adequately prepared to practice safe sex?

If so, then what socio-cultural factors were at work , and what, if any, influence did those factors have that may have led to abstinence only education working as well as it did?

If not, then abstinence only education becomes inadequate to the task at hand and delayed the inevitable while not preparing for it.

While abstinence may be the most effective method of preventing pregnancy or transmission of STDs, sex education needs to be pragmatic and recognize that teens are genetically programmed to become sexually active at some point.

One last point: Just as being pro-choice regarding abortion doesn't imply one's being pro-abortion, providing sex education beyond abstinence doesn't imply that the education is promoting sex.

Just more idealistic right wing Christian nonsense.

Kids will always be curious. Forbidding something on the basis thats it's "immoral", just drives it underground.

John B. Jemmott III concludes that “Theory-based abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement.”
The kids were paid $20 a session to attend one of the groups consisting of only abstinence , one both safe sex and abstinence, one just safe sex, and the last was a control group that simply taught healthy living— eating well, exercise , and the like.

The safe sex kids had half of them having sex, while the abstinence only had a third having sex over two years. Keep this in mind...TWO YEARS. The kids involved in the study were all African Americans and started at the age of 12. It was not the "wait until you are married abstinence". It was the "wait until you are responsible abstinence". Which makes perfect sense to most liberals .
The report states that there was no religious admonitions used during abstinence training.
The training concentrated upon health benefits , financial savings, future rewards and waiting until the kids were ready.
What it showed is that some kids put off until a later age engaging in sexual relations not that abstinence training prevented sex until marriage .

Let's see now, hmmm. The study was done with 6th and 7th grade African-American students . It did not include, Euro-American students, Native-American students, Asian-American students, 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. How many students were involved, two (that qualifies as plural) or 100? Were they from Philadelphia (fairly high African-American population) or from Massapequa, New York (extremely low African-American population)?

So, my conclusion is that this article was completed by someone with a BS degree.

Why on earth would you want to eliminate abstinence education ? When Planned Parenthood and other programs like it come into the school to teach sex education it is more about selling birth control and abortions than it is about teaching sex education to kids . Why do they spend multi-million dollars to come into our schools and teach kids to put on a condom and swallow a birth control pill? Any idiot can do that without any special training, it is absurd but it does let kids know where they can get birth control and that increases Planned Parenthoods profits. What possible harm can abstinence education do except cut into Planned Parenthoods profits and government grant money . Planned Parenthood has no business in our schools, let trained certified teachers teach Health and Human Development, not Planned Parenthood which has a conflict of Interest. Our children deserve better.