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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The White House is pouring money into programs that tell teens to just say no to sex. Most experts say the programs don't work -- except to enrich the religious right.
Feb 24, 2004 | George Bush's proposed 2005 budget cuts funding for veterans' healthcare and public housing. It freezes funding for after-school programs and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grants. It provides less than one-sixth of the increase needed to close the budget shortfall in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which helps low-income HIV patients access medical care and lifesaving drugs. It cuts state Medicaid funding by $1.5 billion.
Yet when it comes to abstinence education, money seems to be no object. Bush's budget recommends $270 million for programs that try to dissuade teenagers from having sex, double the amount spent last year. Much of that money would be given in grants to Christian organizations such as Youth for Christ and to anti-abortion groups operating so-called crisis pregnancy centers, outfits that masquerade as women's health clinics but deliver a strongly anti-abortion message and often medically inaccurate information. It would pay for school programs that teach kids that premarital sex leads to psychological maladies and that sex with condoms is a kind of viral Russian roulette.
Experts in sex education and AIDS prevention say that in a country where the vast majority of people lose their virginity before their wedding night, these lessons aren't just distorted, they're dangerous. "To promote abstinence-only in the era of AIDS is to promote ignorance. It's inexplicable," says James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization devoted to sex education. Some abstinence-only programs, like more comprehensive sex education, have been shown to delay the age at which teenagers first have sex -- which almost everyone agrees is a good thing. Yet studies also show that when teenagers from abstinence-only programs do have sex, they're less likely than others to use protection. Perhaps that's why the teen pregnancy rate in Texas remains one of the highest in the country, despite the abstinence-only policies Bush pushed as governor.
"When you displace decades of public health practice based on what works and substitute a more ideological and political approach to preventing teen pregnancy and HIV, you're really using young people as a political football," says Wagoner. "It's their health and lives that are placed in the balance as a result." And it's not just American lives, either -- Bush is using American leverage to try to force other countries to promote abstinence-only education at the expense of safe sex.
Federally funded abstinence education has been around since 1996, when Clinton's welfare reform bill provided grants to states to teach abstinence. Under Bush, though, it has expanded dramatically, from $97.5 million when he took office to $270 million next year. Bush has also retooled abstinence-only funding so that most of it is given directly to private groups, several of them evangelical religious organizations, and he has put it under the same agency that runs his faith-based initiatives.
For health and social service experts, however, that presents one basic problem: There is no scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs work. Some studies are inconclusive; others find, unambiguously, that the programs don't work. Yet there's one way in which they're clearly effective -- as a massive patronage system for the religious right. Bill Smith, legislative director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS, a nonprofit research and lobbying group that advocates comprehensive sex education, calls abstinence-only grants "political pork."
"This president clearly needs to shore up the right wing of his party," Smith says. "It's not a mistake that in his State of the Union address he suggested doubling domestic spending on these programs. It's an election year and he has to give them something to get their votes."
Bush's involvement with the abstinence-only movement stretches back over a decade and is about more than just electoral politics. It's a case study in the right's subversion of science. Their ideas rejected by mainstream scientists, conservatives have built their own scientific infrastructure, which then buttresses once-derided theories in the political arena. This administration recruits its scientists from that right-wing counterintelligentsia, which has been funded by some of the same groups that are now collecting taxpayer money to teach abstinence-only programs instead of traditional sex education.
The Bush administration has lately come under fire for distorting science for political expediency. Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report on the administration's abuse of science, along with a statement signed by more than 60 scientific luminaries, including 20 Nobel laureates. "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions," the statement says. "This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government's own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice. Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front."
As an example of the president's disregard for science, the report lists Bush's appointment of abstinence advocate Dr. Joe McIlhaney to government advisory panels. It describes McIlhaney as a doctor of "questionable credentials" who is "known for his published disdain for the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and his continued advocacy of abstinence-only programs despite negligible evidence that they actually reduce pregnancy rates among young people."
The founder of a Texas-based pro-abstinence think tank called the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, McIlhaney is an old Bush friend who many say has shaped the president's policies on abstinence. Demonstrating his faith in the doctor, Bush placed him on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and on the advisory committee to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's an enormous leap in legitimacy for McIlhaney, a former OB-GYN and conservative Christian who just nine years ago was reprimanded by the Texas Department of Health for spreading false information about sexually transmitted diseases and condoms' ineffectiveness.
