Subscribe to the RSS feed.Abstinence-Only Education Proven Effective
It has been called the first-ever study demonstrating the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education. A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine of has found that found that abstinence-only sex education helped to delay a group of middle-school students’ sexual initiation
The participants’ mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group.
“This is a rigorous study that means we can now say it’s possible for an abstinence-only intervention to be effective,” Dr. John B. Jemmott III, the University of Pennsylvania professor who led the study.
The research followed 662 African-American students at urban middle schools, paid $20 a session to attend the classes, plus follow-up and evaluation sessions. The abstinence-only classes covered HIV, abstinence and ways to resist the pressure to have sex.
The New York Times reports that the research “appears just as the Obama administration is eliminating federal financing for abstinence-only programs, and starting a pregnancy-prevention initiative that will finance programs that have been shown in scientific studies to be effective.”
The Times also reported that “even longtime advocates of comprehensive sex education heralded the findings,” quoting Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy as saying “This new study is game-changing.”
The public health community has tended to ridicule abstinence-only education as ineffective, politically-motivated, and wishful-thinking by Christian conservatives.
Is this really a “game-changer”?
Will the public health community modify its conventional wisdom on this, or will it make every effort to find flaws in the study?
