“So do you think contraception is always the answer?” a teenager asked me with great sincerity in the halls of Congress last month.  I had just completed a congressional briefing presenting Sex, Lies and Stereotypes: How Abstinence Programs Harm Women and Girls, Legal Momentum’s new report on how government funded abstinence-only programs detrimentally promote sexism and misinformation.  The young inquirer had been part of the National Abstinence Education Association’s lobby day, a group working to preserve federal abstinence funding despite the tide of evidence demonstrating such programs’ ineffectiveness.  It was pure kismet that these events took place on the same day.  

Do I think contraception is always the answer?  Of course not.  But I can appreciate the teen’s need for a simple answer when faced with a topic as complicated as sex.  If his team was preaching abstinence as a cure-all, surely then my group must be promoting contraception as the panacea?  The problem is, there is no one solution that is “always the answer.” 

Young people need honest and comprehensive information about the risks of sexual activity -- and how to responsibly handle those risks if they do decide to become sexually active.  A one-size-fits-all abstinence-only approach fits no one.  It fails in practice and women and girls in particular get hurt.  Yet the federal government instead continues to preach abstinence-only.  And to fund it heavily. 

Sex, Lies & Stereotypes is the most comprehensive examination to date of the nature and extent of these federally funded programs. It calls on parents, teens, policymakers and anyone who cares about public health to demand an end to the senseless and harmful funding of abstinence-only programs.

Disturbing data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that teen birthrates in the United States jumped 3% from 2005 to 2006 after more than 15 years of steady decline. This evolving national crisis calls for honest and comprehensive sex education for teens about the risks of sexual activity.

The federal government has instead spent over $1.5 billion on politically motivated programs that have failed for decades. The following facts are highlighted in the report:

• Reliable, scientific evidence shows that abstinence-only programs fail to positively change teens' sexual behavior.

• These programs have significant potential to exacerbate the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, as well as increase unplanned teen pregnancies.

• While abstinence-only programs target both boys and girls, in practice they contain misinformation and gender stereotypes that have debilitating effects on women and girls worldwide.

Sex, Lies & Stereotypes is the outgrowth of an experts meeting Legal Momentum held in 2006 in partnership with the Human Rights Project at HarvardLawSchool and the Program on International Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.

At the end of the congressional day, I was sorry I did not have more time to talk with the teens in the abstinence-only lobby group.  Teens are smart enough to spend the day lobbying Congress, and certainly are intelligent enough to be taught genuine comprehensive sex education.  For some teens the choice to remain abstinent until marriage may always be The Answer.  But if that choice ever changes or fails as things get more complicated, all teens should have learned a back-up method.