Maggie Gallagher did her syndicated column on the new abstinence studies. (Regular Ruth readers already know something about this controversy. See our posts here, here, and here and our podcasts here .)
The release of this new study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine this week is weirdly timely. …It’s just the gold standard for intervention research, a bright and shining pinnacle of research design that social science seldom ever reaches: random assignment….The main conclusion of this rigorous clinical trial? “The abstinence-only intervention compared with the health-promotion control intervention reduced by about 33 percent the percentage of students who ever reported having sexual intercourse by the time of the 24-month follow-up, controlling for grade, age and intervention-maintenance condition.” Wow. Any negative side effects? Are the kids less likely to use condoms? Nope….
How about the contraceptive “safer sex” education program? Did teaching the kids to use condoms make them more likely to use condoms? Remarkably, no. The kids in the control group were just as likely to use condoms as kids given safer-sex education. Well, then, did the comprehensive “abstinence plus” approach do better at increasing condom use, compared to doing nothing? No, it did not either delay sex or increase condom use, either. The abstinence-only approach, in this one rigorous study, was the only one that “worked.”
Maggie is appalled, just as I am, that the Sexual Revolutionaries get a free pass on the evidence question:
the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) required no real study at all to claim (and get widely reported as “fact”) that abstinence-only education was causing the increase in teen pregnancy rates. Yet in 2008, according to a Health and Human Services funding analysis requested by Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., the federal government spent just $177 million on abstinence education compared to $609 million on contraceptive-based sex education.
Maggie’s bottom line is similar to mine. I think my sensible readers agree:
Are progressives like Carolyn Maloney going to call for an end to safer-sex education now? Will the Guttmacher Institute retract its attack? Will President Obama step forward to restore abstinence-only funding?
We will learn something about the alleged commitment of people like this to science from their response to this new research.