Of Abstinence and Swift Boats

While we at Birth Pangs applaud any effort to reduce or regulate pregnancy, we have to giggle express our bitter disappointment at a report released Friday that found that abstinence education is ineffective. Or, in the words of James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth:

After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions.

The report was commissed by the US Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research. From a press release:

This is the first study of multi-year abstinence programs, and it is one of the few that has tracked its sample members for as long as six years,” notes Christopher Trenholm, the project director and a senior researcher at Mathematica. “The study finds that the sexual abstinence of students in four programs selected for the study was much the same as that of students who did not participate in these programs.

Not surprisingly, the National Abstinence Educators Association (NAEA) found fault with the study. In its press release, it referred interested readers to ‘medical information’ from the Medical Institute. There, under the heading ‘Sexual Health’ we find this:

Persons of all ages can aspire to optimal sexual health. Therefore, mentors and individuals in the helping professions should facilitate movement toward this ideal for people in all conditions and life stages. This ideal evolves as a person matures from childhood through adulthood.

For children: parenting adults provide protection, guidance, and healthy role models

For adolescents: delay of sexual debut, ideally until committing to a life-long mutually monogamous relationship such as marriage

For adults: abstinence outside of a life-long mutually monogamous relationship such as marriage

Of course, this study had been in the works for a while. Two weeks ago, Scott Swenson of RH Reality Check revealed:

Using membership dues paid in part by federal tax dollars, the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA) hired the Washington, DC, public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, best known for the 2004 “Swift Boat Veterans” ads against John Kerry, to launch a public relations effort supporting the failed and unpopular abstinence only education policies.

. . . The leadership of NAEA also needs to be investigated. Some of them already have been. Their Advisory Committee is a who’s who of those who have profited from the Bush Administration’s diversion of one billion taxpayer dollars to cronies supporting abstinence only education policies.

One notable NAEA Advisor, Valerie Huber, headed Ohio abstinence programs for several years. Last year she was the subject of a state ethics probe when it was discovered she steered state contracts toward an organization in which she had a personal interest. That probe resulted in disciplinary action against Huber, but she remained in her position, under the notoriously corrupt administration of Gov. Bob Taft, whom Ohio voters rejected last year.

To sum up, abstinence education is fetus-fetishizing bullcrap of questionable value. And its promoters are a bunch of lying, corrupt, Swift-Boaters concerned.