Report Exposes 'Abstinence Plus' as Safe-Sex Lie in Disguise
by Bill Fancher
July 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - A conservative group says promoters of the safe-sex myth have turned to lies to get their programs reinstated in the public education system. A new report reveals blatant attempts to fool parents about comprehensive sex-ed programs, often called "Abstinence Plus."Melissa Pardue of the Heritage Foundation explains. What the researchers found, she says, suggests that such "Abstinence Plus" curricula are in fact "very misleading programs that seek to trick parents into thinking that their children and teenagers are being taught abstinence when in fact it is the same safe-sex message, simply repackaged with a very misleading and deceitful label."
The Foundation spokeswoman says the report on comprehensive sex education -- titled "Comprehensive Sex Education vs. Authentic Abstinence: A Study of Competing Curricula" -- reveals how deceptive these programs tend to be and even demonstrates numerically how parents and students are being duped. The researchers found that these programs tend to present far less material emphasizing the abstinence message and may bear far more resemblance to programs that emphasize contraception and condom use.
"We examined nine authentic abstinence programs and compared those to nine comprehensive sex-ed programs," Pardue notes, "and found out that these comprehensive sex-ed programs, also known as Abstinence Plus, [contain] very little [material about] abstinence. On average, they contain about 4.7 percent abstinence, versus an authentic abstinence program which is over 53 percent abstinence."
Pardue says these "Abstinence Plus" programs are nothing more than the tired, old "safe-sex" programs, repackaged. And these are the same programs, she adds, that have failed to prevent more than 20 million U.S. teenagers from becoming infected with sexually transmitted diseases.
