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June 7, 2007 |
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With Friends Like These...
Democrats INCREASE Funding for Discredited Abstinence-Only Policy
WASHINGTON, DC (June 7, 2007) Today, the Democratic leadership of the House Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Service, and Education (LHHS) Sub-committee set science and commonsense aside by increasing the funding for discredited abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Despite a congressionally mandated report that found these programs do not work to help teens delay sexual initiation, House leadership allocated $141 million (an increase of $27.8 million) to continue feeding America’s young people misinformation.
“Let’s face it, with friends like these, who needs conservative Republicans?” asked James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth. “By continuing to fund these ineffective programs, the House Democratic leadership has signaled that the health and well-being of America’s teens are not their priority. Young people and their parents should be outraged.”
Since 1982, Congress has allocated over $1.5 billion for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that censor information about birth control and the health benefits of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. The 10-year study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. found that “Youth in the [abstinence-only] program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.”
"The facts are supposed to matter when it came to public policy,” added Wagoner. “But with this decision, the leaders in the new Congress have exposed themselves as public health frauds - ignoring the evidence and research - in favor of politics and appeasement.”
Although teen pregnancy rates are decreasing, the United States still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world with between 750,000 and 850,000 teen pregnancies a year. Each year, teens in the United States contract an estimated 9.1 million sexually transmitted infections and approximately 50 young people a day, an average of two young people every hour of every day, are infected with HIV.
"The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, which this clearly is,” added Wagoner, “but it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. Democrats are now officially on record as promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS - that’s not just bad public health policy, it’s also bad ethics and it’s just bad leadership.”
Over ten years, a number of other reports have sent clear signals to an ideologically controlled Congress that funding abstinence-only-until-marriage programs was wrong. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine stated that the abstinence-only policy was “poor fiscal and public health policy” and recommended that the programs be stopped. By 2004, ten state evaluations (Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington) showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact on teen sexual behavior.
In 2006, the Society for Adolescent Medicine (SAM) called the programs “scientifically and ethically flawed” and found that the “efficacy of abstinence-only interventions may approach zero.” That same year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) admonished Health and Human Services for its lack of oversight in ensuring that these programs provided “medically accurate information about condom effectiveness.”
“The overriding consensus among mainstream medical and public health organizations, parents, and young people themselves sends a clear and unambiguous message that the new leadership of this Congress is ignoring,” concluded Wagoner. “Americans want a comprehensive approach to sex education that includes both information on abstinence and scientifically accurate information on contraceptives and condoms. We will spend the next several months making sure the Democratic leadership hears from these parents.”
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Advocates for Youth is a national, nonprofit organization that creates programs and supports policies that help young people make safe, responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive health.
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