Some comprehensive sex-education curricula that's taught in the nation's schools has essentially no impact on behavior – according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services that was released this week.
Critics of abstinence education have been raising challenges on the basis of "medical inaccuracy," but the HHS study found abstinence-ed programs to be nearly 100 percent accurate. Moreover, the report placed abstinence ed on par with comprehensive sex ed as far as medical accuracy: "It could easily be argued that the comprehensive sex education curricula reviewed… have a similar rate of error compared with abstinence-until-marriage curricula."
Angela Griffiths, executive director of Await & Find, said some members of Congress have painted a false picture of abstinence education.
"Congressman (Henry) Waxman, (D-Calif.), and others have been holding abstinence-education programs to a different standard than they're willing to hold all adolescent-health education programs," she told Family News in Focus.
The report was critical of comprehensive sex-ed curricula for being remarkably narrow in scope. Even the most "balanced" lessons mentioned condoms seven times more often than abstinence.
"They're condom-promotion and contraceptive-promotion programs," Griffiths said. "That is a description of what they do. Calling them 'comprehensive' is somehow saying that they do more than what abstinence programs do."
The study also found the way comprehensive sex ed presented information to be amoral and explicit.
Leslie Unruh, president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, said it's time for parents to speak up about what's being taught.
"It's teaching some really different kinds of thinking that really you would expect to see in pornography," she said. "What is going to happen if people do not stand up is they will get this kind of radical sex ed in all the schools in America."
