Features > November 11, 2005 > Web Only

Mo Money for Monogamy

Pro-life organizations are receiving millions of federal dollars in the name of “abstinence education.”

By Silja J.A. Talvi

Over the past five years, the Bush administration has put more than $600 million federal dollars into the coffers of abstinence-until-marriage programs. Critics contend that such funding is a back-door way to provide infrastructure funding to the religious right since many of these no-sex sex education programs are housed within Christian, evangelical, pro-life organizations.

In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Administration for Children and Families issued the latest batch of federal disbursements, totaling $37 million to 63 grantees.

In announcing the grants, Wade Horn, HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, said, “the only way to be 100 percent certain that kids avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is to stay abstinent until marriage.”

“By focusing on this clear message,” Horn said, “the Bush administration is ensuring youth have the information they need to make the healthiest decision.”

The relationship between abstinence and health is highly questionable. A March 2005 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health reported that STD rates among virginity “pledgers” and non-pledgers were about the same. Furthermore, the findings indicated that virginity pledgers were less likely to see a doctor if they feared having contracted an STD, and were consequently less frequently tested for and/or diagnosed for STDs.

Although not publicized by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at all, many of this year’s grants have actually gone to so-called Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), of which there are at least 3,200 in the United States.

CPCs do not offer abortions. Instead, they attempt to sway pregnant girls and women away from that choice through counseling that emphasizes the physical and psychological trauma of abortion. Among the dozens of CPCs on the most recent list of federal grant recipients are Crisis Pregnancy Center, Inc., in Anchorage, Alaska ($663,845); New Hope Center in Edgewood, Kentucky ($799,935); Pregnancy Counseling Center in Reno, Nevada ($371,358); Elizabeth’s New Life Center in Dayton, Ohio ($800,000); Charlottesville Pregnancy Center in Virginia ($645,642); and the Several Sources Foundation Center in Ramsey, New Jersey ($800,00). Several Sources is a self-described “non-profit Christian organization” that touts its “chastity” training for women who have already become pregnant and claims that it has “saved” 15,000 children, presumably from abortion.

That taxpayers’ dollars are being directly funneled into religious organizations like these has raised concerns about constitutional separation of church and state. Three states have refused to accept abstinence-only federal funding—California, Pennsylvania and, in September, Maine.

And in August, the ACLU decided to sue HHS in Boston over the faith-based aspects of a program known as the “Silver Ring Thing.”

Students exposed to this program were given the choice of picking the “faith-based” track, and then given fancy Bibles and silver ring engraved with a scriptural verse. The students who opted for the secular version were given a ring engraved with the word, “waiting.” Silver Ring Thing has already received more than $1 million in federal dollars, and the funding is likely to be restored once “tweaks” to the program are in place. One of the most recent HHS funding recipients, Knoxville Leadership Foundation in Tennessee ($354,236), uses the Silver Ring Thing program while “reconciling people to Jesus Christ and to each other.”

With all this money being channeled to organizations intervening in the lives of women and girls who have already become pregnant, it’s hard to see for whom the actual abstinence education is intended. Scattered throughout the grant list are a few abstinence-focused agencies developing curriculum for junior high and high school students, including the Illinois-based Abstinence and Marriage Education Partnership ($800,000); and Virginia’s Educational Guidance Institute ($698,840). Both of these agencies have ties to a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

HHS itself promotes abstinence-only programs on a Web site it unveiled earlier this year (4Parents.gov) that designed to give parents the tools to talk to their kids about sex.

According to research by the Feminist Majority Foundation and Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SEICUS), the site was designed with the help of National Physicians for Family Resources, a group with strong ties to right-wing organizations. 4Parents.gov goes to great lengths to stress abstinence over any other option and, in doing so, exaggerates the risks involved with using condoms, or even contracting certain STDs through various forms of sexual activity.

This is the same message conveyed in many abstinence-only education materials, including three books highlighted by SIECUS in its third annual “Back to School Briefing.” Those books, Worth the Wait, Passions and Principles and Navigator, are making their way through school curricula in more than a dozen states.

The materials are typically fear-based, positing extreme consequences to any kind of sexual activity. One of the dice games recommended by the Passions and Principles book instructs the teacher to say the following when a four is rolled: “You’re heading to the grave. No cure.”

For FY06, President Bush has announced his intention to seek an additional $206 million for abstinence education. And he—and the religious right—can apparently rest assured that HHS will do the “right” thing with that funding.

“Tell your son or daughter that the best way to avoid getting an STD is for them not to have vaginal, oral, or anal sex,” the 4Parents.gov instructs parents, “until they are in a mutually faithful, monogamous relationship, preferably marriage.”

In other words, wait until marriage and you can have all the anal sex you want? More enticing than a silver ring, perhaps? Maybe they’ve just been keeping these kinds of scintillating messages from the rest of us all along.

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• Reader Comments

  I find it so hard to understand why Ms Talvi is so afraid of providing kids with a message that research supports as the best choice for them. The problem of STDs and pregnancy isn’t that kids didn’t use a condom the problem is that kids are having sex. Abstinence education follows a risk avoidance model and is a completely new way of thinking for people who relied on risk reduction in the 60’s and 70’s to protect them from basically two diseases, syphilis and gonorrhea.  Kids today are facing over 25 STIs and 1 in 4 sexually active teens is contracting a disease.  It is important to note that teens are figuring out that they are not safe and a majority of them are for the first time in a decade abstaining from sex.  It is also important to note that comprehensive sex education has been effective at getting more kids to use condoms.  Over the past 20 years, teens have shown the greatest increase in the use of condoms but simultaneously and unfortunately the greatest increase in STDs. New research on condom effectiveness is not returning the results we would all hope for and have come to depend on.
  
  It is the responsibility of parents, educators, and community to provide kids with clear messages and expectations regarding areas of risky behavior. In a study done by Dartmouth College and the YMCA researchers found that people are biologically primed for relationships.  They are ‘Hardwired to connect’ in two primary areas which nurture and govern healthy growth into adulthood.  What the study found was that there was a crisis of American childhood for lack of connectedness. There are the connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning.  I am sure the first one is no big surprise and NBC was confirming the second with its recent broadcast of Baby boomers seeking spirituality for the latter half of their lives.  “You mean there is more to life than money, sex, and power?” Keep reading.

  Ms Talvi is correct in that people of faith and moral conviction are standing up to defend the character of our kids.  Character education which is what Abstinence is based on rejects the kind of moral relativism that so many people mistake for individual freedom.  It is understandable why people are offended because it reasserts the idea of objective moral truth- the notion that some things are truly right and others truly wrong.  For instance that adultery is wrong, torture wrong, date rape wrong, cheating wrong, and the taking of innocent life wrong are objective moral truths-even if many people don’t realize it.  Objective moral truths have a claim on our conscience and behavior.  The modern subjectivist notion touted by Ms Talvi is that we should each follow our own conscience, but that is a dangerous half-truth.  We must first form our conscience to that which is objectively true and right.  This involves trading some of our individual rights to be part of something that is so much bigger than ourselves.

  We all need to ask ourselves if it is wrong to believe in our kids.  We spend billions on roads, and wars we should stop to ask ourselves or better yet our neighbor, what are we fighting for and where are we going?  Does it lead to increased hope for our kids?  Does it lead to life?

  Posted by 4life4hope4all on Nov 11, 2005 at 8:48 AM

  Abstinence is best. I started with sex at far too young an age. A fast and furious attitude towards sex in my teenage years and into my twenties has burned me out. I thank God I made it through unscathed.

  Isn’t the free and loose attitude towards sex partially responsible for an abundance of problems.

  Need examples? How about :

  Explosions in numbers of teenage mothers.Irresponsible teenage fathers and mothers. Children suffering for it. Some children neglected and others unwanted. Dare I mention abortion? Sex is cheap and life is cheaper?

  Adultery and Divorce. Parents and children suffering for it.

  Sexually transmitted diseases.

  Booming business in prostitution and pornography. Victims all around.

  Some sexual revolution it has been.

  I long for the good old days of prudence.

  I am not old enough to have experienced the days before the sexual revolution(s) but am waiting patiently for a counter revolution.

  Posted by David in Canada on Nov 11, 2005 at 1:21 PM

  hey 4life, sorry but you’re looking at bad research - in reality, abstinence programs are insidious, superfluous and ridiculous.  A self-indulging consecrated belief that it is your manifest destiny to ordain zealous, deluding biblical tenets upon teenagers is not only wishful thinking, but destructive as well.  I have successfully raised my children by fomenting character, intelligence, reason and love, without obscuring them with the half-truths and blatant lies of religious or faith-based nonsense.

  Posted by Pro-Phylactic on Nov 11, 2005 at 1:59 PM

  Abstinence is good.  But funding the right wing of the Republican party with taxpayer money is not.  Who is the absolute genius who came up with this idea that can’t be criticized without seeming to be pro-teen pregnancy?

  Those Reps are smart, aren’t they?  Maybe they SHOULD have control over our lives.  Maybe some of their smart will rub off on us.

  Mag

  Posted by Mitcherino on Nov 11, 2005 at 2:04 PM

  Monogamy is best too.

  I look at friends who were abstinent and waited for or waited until a faithful and monogamous relationship or a faithful and monogamous marriage for a (fully) sexual relationship and see the undeniable benefits.

  They are more likely to be monogamous and continue to be so than those who were not abstinent or monogamous.

  Like I say, I am burned out now, sexual relationships mean little to me and increasingly so. I blame my early lack of abstinence and monogamy. Maybe it is just a phase :)

  If I had kids I would be telling them to wait and be faithful. My parents told me these things but I did not listen very well. Not too much regret but I sometimes wish I had waited longer and done some things differently.

  Posted by David in Canada on Nov 11, 2005 at 2:08 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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