Like I said, but now it’s news

Hitting the news today: Reuters Health reports on what I’ve been telling you about kids and sex ed — all of us front-line sex educators have been telling everyone — for years (from my Google Tech talk on abstinence education last month to 2006’s Open Source Sex podcast interview about working the SFSI hotlines)… ABC, who is incidentally on my shit list big time for their ugly, predictably biased, slanted piece on sex workers and Diane Sawyer should totally be required to do a little sex work before she ever exploits sex workers and their lurid stereotypes again (nonconsensual sound/autoplay warning) — ABC actually manages to actually get a clue for a *second* by opening their mildly biased coverage (“Is Sex Ed Working?“) with the STD dangers, “The political and ethical debate over what to teach teenagers about sex is being reinvigorated after a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Now some say the study, the first of its kind, reveals why it’s so important to teach teens not to have sex at all; others argue that the study proves that federally funded abstinence-only education isn’t working.” Snip from Reuters:

Comprehensive sex education that includes discussion of birth control may help reduce teen pregnancies, while abstinence-only programs seem to fall short, the results of a U.S. survey suggest.

Using data from a 2002 national survey, researchers found that among more than 1,700 unmarried, heterosexual teens between 15 and 19 years old, those who’d received comprehensive sex ed in school were 60 percent less likely to have been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant than teens who’d had no formal sex education.

Meanwhile, there was no clear benefit from abstinence-only education in preventing pregnancy or delaying sexual intercourse, the researchers report in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study found that teens who’d been through abstinence-only programs were less likely than those who’d received no sex ed to have been pregnant. However, the difference was not significant in statistical terms, which means the finding could have been due to chance.

In addition, there was no evidence that comprehensive sex education increased the likelihood of teen sex or boosted rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) — a concern of people who oppose teaching birth control in schools. While comprehensive sex ed did not clearly reduce the STD risk, there was a modest, but statistically insignificant reduced risk of engaging in sex. The abstinence-only approach had no effect on either factor, the researchers found.

“The bottom line is that there is strong evidence that comprehensive sex education is more effective than abstinence-only education at preventing teen pregnancies,” said lead researcher Pamela K. Kohler, of the Center for AIDS and STD at the University of Washington in Seattle. She told Reuters Health the study “also solidly debunks the myth that teens who learn about birth control are more likely to have sex.” (…::sigh::)