US Teenage Sex Education Wars - Texas Style

According to this article, United States President George W. Bush has spent a record US$120 million on promoting abstinence in 2003. His US$15 billion AIDS relief package for Africa and the Caribbean requires that a third of annual funding for prevention go to abstinence programmes. He and other advocates of abstinence-only sex education assert that abstinence prevents teen pregnancy, that condoms do not work, and that sex outside marriage is immoral. Accordingly, recipients of federal abstinence funds may neither "promote nor endorse" condoms, and can only discuss their use in terms of failure rates. Cash-strapped schools often feel tempted to accept these funds. One Texas project that receives the funds, The McLennan County Collaborative Abstinence Project (McCAP), aired 30-second television public service announcements (PSAs) warning that messages that encourage teenagers to use condoms are "life-threatening lies". Raylene Silver, a county HIV health educator, reported that students who had seen the PSAs "come to me and say 'Why should we [use] condoms when they don't work?'"

But, from the perspective of advocates of comprehensive sex education, condoms do prevent the transmission of HIV if used properly and consistently. These advocates urge education that promotes abstinence and provides scientifically accurate information on preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), as well as pregnancy. Every major USA medical association as well as research institutes and human rights organisations take this latter position, arguing that abstinence and contraception must go hand-in-hand and that teenagers must be given potentially life-saving information.

Texas, President Bush's home state, has the fourth highest number of reported AIDS cases in the country. During his years as state governor (1995-2000), Bush sought to curb teen pregnancy by allocating over US$6 million in state funds to support abstinence-only education. Nonetheless, the USA has the highest pregnancy rate in the developed world and in Texas 80,000 teens become pregnant every year. According to a 2003 report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 1 in 5 US teenagers has had sex by the age of 15. However, the teen birth rate has fallen 20% during 1991-2001 and teen sexual activity has decreased 15%. A 2001 study by the US Centers for Disease Control determined that decline is due to a combination of factors.

"Kids are going to have sex, so [abstinence education] isn't too smart on the part of the public schools," according to a 15-year-old from Austin, Texas. A 2001 poll of 1,000 adult Texans found that 86% of those surveyed favour comprehensive sex education. One young woman from Texas quoted in the article became pregnant at 16, dropped out of school, and never returned to finish her education. "My kids are going to learn all the sex education they need right here from me, because I'm going to tell them," she stated.

Click here for the full article on the Panos site.