Advocates for Youth: end ideology trumping public health science

[paineinthearse]

FY 06 Budget: Cuts for Vital Health and Social Programs, Increases for Unproven, Factually Inaccurate Abstinence-Only Programs

2/8/2005 10:21:00 AM


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To: National Desk

Contact: Bill Barker of Advocates for Youth, 202-419-3420

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is a statement of Advocates for Youth President James Wagoner:

In the context of a budget that slashes spending for essential programs, from heating for seniors to bioterrorism prevention, the $38 million increase for unproven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs is dumbfounding. The decision is even more difficult to defend, given recent reports that curricula used by a majority of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs provide false and misleading information. Additional funding proposed in the President's new budget would bring the total allocated for these programs to $205.5 million in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2004.

Fully five years after the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the nation's leading scientific body, called for the elimination of federal and state funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs because there is no credible evidence of effectiveness, Congress has already pushed total funding for these programs over the billion dollar mark. Far from allocating another cent to these unproven efforts, Congress should launch a full investigation into how the false and inaccurate information contained in the curricula has impacted adolescents' knowledge and attitudes.

How many young people who have taken these programs now think that HIV is spread through tears and saliva? How many more believe that chlamydia causes heart disease?

State evaluations, including the most recent from the President's home state of Texas, already show these programs don't work to delay sexual initiation. That's one reason to stop funding them.

Shouldn't we be cutting programs that have no proven effectiveness?

At the very least, the federal government should be in the business of providing medically accurate information to the youth of this country.

Again, the IOM has cited abstinence-only-until-marriage programs as examples of "poor fiscal and public health policy," and, in addition, the nation's most trusted medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Society for Adolescent Medicine (SAM), all support comprehensive sex education - an approach that includes strong messages of both abstinence and contraception. Every Surgeon General since C. Everett Koop has recommended this approach as well.

It's time to get real and quit allowing ideology to trump public health science.

http://www.usnewswire.com/

[asjr]

1. Trying to legislate morality (or immorality) is a no-brainer.

The right-wing locomotive is on a runaway course which seems to have steam built up. It must be stopped. Their reasons are not constitutional. I really am more afraid now than ever before.

[Warpy]

2. The February issue of Harper's has excerpts from

those abstinence "teaching materials," and they are appalling, a mix of disinformation, rabid sexism, and right wing propaganda.

I sincerely hope this generation knows they are being lied to, and I hope they will do what we did when we found out we'd been lied to.

[CPschem]

3. That excerpt was unbelievable

truly a despicable scam.