Opponents of abstinence-only education have a long and scientifically-documented laundry list of complaints. Abstinence-only education has never been found to work, it often defies any attempt to be quantifiably measured in the first place, and in many cases the educational materials contain gross scientific inaccuracies about STDs, sexual behavior, and contraception.

Opponents have also suggested that by not teaching youth about other methods of contraception and STD prevention, when these youth do decide to have sex, they’re more likely to have dangerous unprotected sex.

This month a multi-year study that was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research was released, confirmed much of what opponents have believed, and what has already been discovered through previous scientific research, but not everything.

Specifically, one surprising result was that, while the study confirmed that abstinence-only programs did not have an impact on sexual abstinence of youth, it also found that youth who were enrolled in abstinence-only programs were not more likely to engage in unprotected sex than youths who were not enrolled in these programs.

I'm sure I'm not the only person surprised by this finding. It seems a reasonable concern that if you don’t offer youth information about contraceptive methods you reduce the chance that youth will use those methods of contraception. And I wonder about how the study controlled for contraception information the youth were getting outside of their school based programs.

It’s also worth putting the youth in the study in context. For example the average age of first intercourse for study participants was 14.9, which is considerably lower than most large studies indicate of the general population of U.S. teenagers. The authors point out the skew in these numbers may be due to the fact that the results are only reported for teens that have had sex and the average age of participants was under seventeen years old.

This report comes at a time when more and more states are opting out of the Federal program which offers funds but only for abstinence-only education. While some educators likely hope this is just another nail in the coffin of abstinence-only education, at the very least I hope it points to a direction of more evidence-based discussions at the government level about the effectiveness of such programs and the wisdom of continuing to fund them at the expense of comprehensive education.

Read the complete report: Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs”