Abstinence Education (Or Abstinence-only Education): is It Worth It?

By YvonneG

     While researching the importance of teaching abstinence, I found that there were various opinions on its effectiveness.    The opinions ranged from being completely effective, to somewhat useful, to being totally useless.    I believe that these ranges of opinions are all true because we’re dealing with different groups of people coming from a variety of backgrounds and upbringings, who have been exposed to all kinds of situations.    Given that most children are not taught about sex at an age when they truly need to learn about it, it usually turns out that by the time adults begin some type of proper sexual education, the child has already been introduced to the harmful and inaccurate assumptions received from their peers and the world around them.

     On the “openeducation.net” website, an article was published by site editor Tom Hanson in January 2009.    In this article, it was noted that during the Bush Administration, funding for abstinence-only education tripled from $73 million per year in 2001 to $204 million in 2008.    However, in spite of this significant amount, it appeared that abstinence-only education was “losing steam”.    Mr. Hanson notes that several federally-funded studies have been done (two of such studies were done by the Cochrane Collaboration and Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.) and these studies found that this type of education had little affect on teens’ sexual behavior.    They found the result was the same as what it would’ve been if there was no education at all.    In other words, abstinence-only education was totally useless and there were many who felt this funding should’ve been stopped altogether.

     There are those who believe that the appropriate thing to do is teach our children about “safe sex” — that is, using a condom when engaging in sexual activity.    The theory is it’s likely that teenagers are going to indulge in sexual activity because reality says abstinence is out of the question.    Therefore, we should at least prepare them by teaching them how to correctly engage in this act.

     In order to determine the right and wrong about this, we should examine the nature of sexual intercourse more closely.    At first glance, we learn that generally speaking, sex is the union of two people in which feelings of great affection, paasion and intimacy are expressed.    Besides pleasure, the most important purpose of sexual intercourse is the production of children.    This explanation is simple and straight forward; however, life tells us that sex is far from being a simple matter.