Under the Bush Administration, federal funding for abstinence-only programs has grown rapidly. Yet there is no scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs are effective. In fact, recently released reports 1) find programs contain false and misleading information and 2) question the programs' effectiveness.

10-Year Government Evaluation Finds Abstinence-Only Programs Have no impact on teen behavior

A federally funded evaluation of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, released on April 13, 2007, showed that the programs had no impact on teen behavior. The official government report concludes: “Findings indicate that youth in the 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.”

Click here to read the full report, Impact of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs (Final Report) (pdf), prepared by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

Waxman's Congressional Report Finds that Abstinence-Only Programs Contain False and Misleading Information

In December 2004, Rep. Henry A. Waxman released a report showing that many federally funded abstinence-only education programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors.

Click here to read the full report (pdf) prepared by the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Government Reform.

Two Reports from Advocates for Youth Question Effectiveness of Abstinence-Only Programs

In addition, Advocates for Youth recently released two reports that raise questions about the effectiveness of the abstinence-only-until-marriage approach to sex education endorsed by the federal government.

State Evaluations of Abstinence-only Programs

State evaluations of the abstinence-only federal initiative are just now becoming available. Advocates for Youth's analysis, Five Years of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education: Assessing the Impact, covers evaluations from Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. The review found that abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained, long-term impact on adolescents' attitudes favoring abstinence or on teens' intentions to abstain. Importantly, in only one of the ten states did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex, and none showed long-term success in impacting teen sexual behavior.

National Data on Teen Sexual Behavior

Advocates for Youth contracted with an independent statistician to analyze data, recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about sexual behavior among high school students from 1991 to 2003. Advocates' report on the analysis of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS), Trends in Sexual Risk Behaviors among High School Students—U.S., 1991 to 1997 and 1999 to 2003, found that the much-touted improvements in adolescent sexual risk-taking behavior actually took place from 1991 to 1997. These improvements did not continue into the time period between 1999 and 2003—which corresponds to the first years of the abstinence-only initiative.