Abstinence sucks as public policy

A report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that teen pregnancy rates are on the rise in the US, for the first time since 1991.  And the numbers suggest that the states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are the states that emphasize abstinence-only sexual education.

Here’s my official stance:  abstinence is a perfectly good personal decision, but it’s terrible public policy.  There’s loads of evidence for this, and it keeps piling up.  We’re now seeing that abstinence-only education not only doesn’t keep kids from having sex, but it seems to correlate to kids not using contraception when they do have sex.  So not only does it not achieve its own stated goal, but it actually might be responsible for the increase in teen pregnancy rates that we’re seeing (along with an increase in sexually transmitted infections like syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.  People, what decade are we in?) And we as a country are spending $176 million on abstinence-only education every year.

This is not even taking into consideration the cost to us a society when teenagers have babies.  In South Carolina, the total cost to taxpayers associate with teen childbearing was $156 million in 2004.  And the cost to those teens themselves is even higher, as they’re more likely to drop out of high school and live in poverty.

One senior research fellow with the abstinence-happy Heritage Foundation was quoted in the New York Times as saying that most teens who get pregnant want to have babies.  Is there any evidence for that at all?  Robert Rector, have you ever met a teenaged girl?

Again and again, research has shown that the way to decrease unwanted pregnancies (and abortions) is to provide information about and access to contraception.  My own experience backs this up:  my students, many of whom are teens fresh out of some of South Carolina’s abstinence-only high schools, are often woefully uninformed about how their bodies work.  But many of them are having sex--and they’re hungry for real information on preventing pregnancy and disease.

The US has the highest teen pregnancy rate among all developed nations, and it’s getting higher.  If you’re as disgruntled about this as I am, take some action.  Write a letter to the editor, write your elected officials (including your school board), and let’s see if we can’t get up to date with the 21st century.