MisInformation Exchange

UPDATE: New Government Website Disregards Findings on Efficacy of Abstinence-only Programs

The Department of Health and Human Services recently launched a website to encourage parents to talk with their teenage children about sexual abstinence: www.4parents.gov. Instead of providing accurate information on the site, the National Organization for Women found that the website “relies on fear to motivate and contains many errors and biases that undermine its intent of encouraging parent-child communication around sex and sexuality.” NOW also cites a lack of information for parents of sexually abused and assaulted youth and a failure to address the needs of parents with LGBTQ children among the failures of the website. According to the 145 advocacy groups who sent a letter to HHS on Thursday, March 31 criticizing the website as biased and inaccurate, the website also includes inaccurate information about the efficacy of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.

In MISSING, NCRW cited a Union of Concerned Scientists’ finding in their 2004 report that officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) distorted science-based performance measures used to test the effectiveness of sex education programs in preventing unwanted pregnancies by using new measures which obscured the lack of efficacy of abstinence-only programs.

Since MISSING’s release, there have been several new studies outside the CDC that have questioned the efficacy of abstinence-only sex education programs. For example, on December 1, 2004, Representative Henry Waxman released a report examining 13 of the most commonly used federally-funded abstinence programs in the US and found that the majority of these programs present false and misleading information. 11 of the programs used by 69 organizations in 25 states—contain “unproven claims, subjective conclusions, or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health.” Waxman’s full report can be accessed here.

Another recent study documented how dangerousthese misrepresentations are to the health of young adults. The report, published in the April 2005 edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health, titled The STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges, found that teenagers who take virginity pledges are almost as likely to be infected with an STI as those who never make the pledge. Although these teenagers have on average, fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex.

Despite these findings, President Bush has requested $206 million in federal funding for abstinence-only programs this year.

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