Out of the Forest

A new report reveals that teenagers who take part in “abstinence-only” sex education are just as likely to have sex as other teens:

It’s been a central plank of George Bush’s social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 – posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys.

The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn’t worked. At all.

A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.

I guess sexual beings will be sexual beings.

Interestingly, the liklihood of protected sex is the same for both groups. So is teaching kids how to have safe sex a waste of money as well?