Wait Gains: Abstinence Gets Hill Boost
by Tony Perkins, FRC:
President Obama wasn’t just opposed to abstinence — he practiced it when it came to funding conservative sex ed. For eight years, he poured millions of dollars down the drain of “comprehensive” sex education, unraveling President Bush’s positive progress on teen pregnancy in the process. After two terms of Obama’s “if-it-feels-good-do-it” approach, most experts agree he accomplished one thing: making the situation worse. “Compared with their peers,” a 2016 study found, “teenagers in the [government’s programs] were more likely to begin having sex… and more likely to get pregnant.” And it’s no wonder. The curriculum is so extreme that 40 percent of young people actually said they felt more pressure to engage in sex from their sex ed classes than from their boyfriends or girlfriends! Like so many of the failed programs and policies of the Obama administration, the federal government needs to return to an approach that a) either empowers parents to decide what their children are taught and/or b) includes proven abstinence-based programs that respect and value teens.
Today, with our friends at Ascend, FRC co-hosted a special Hill briefing aimed at “Rethinking Sex Ed” in public policy. In late 2015, when none of President Obama’s strategies were working, Congress agreed to a modest $10 million bump in grants for the kinds of sexual risk avoidance (SRA) messaging that families want. But, as Ascend points out, 90 cents of every federal sex ed dollar still goes to programs that not only normalize — but encourage — early intimacy. That doesn’t make financial sense, not when as many as 60 percent of teenagers are willing to wait, and certainly not when parents on both sides of the political spectrum prefer SRA lessons over the risk reduction that Planned Parenthood and other liberal groups preach. As Valerie Huber points out, “In an increasingly sexualized culture, ALL youth, regardless of where they come from or their past sexual experience, need and deserve the information that can help them make choices to eliminate the risk.”
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