NEW YORK – More than one-third of U.S. high schools teach abstinence until marriage and 700 abstinence programs spread the sex-can-wait gospel in all 50 states. And with high-powered backing from the White House, abstinence education is poised to gain even more momentum.
Next year President George W. Bush hopes to boost abstinence spending to $135 million — up from $60 million in 1998 — fulfilling a campaign promise to spend as much on abstinence as on teen family planning programs. Abstinence is such a big priority that it falls into the portfolio of top Bush political guru Karl Rove, reports National Correspondent Debra Rosenberg. And it’s also one social issue the new Republican Congress is eager to advance.
The abstinence drive comes at a time when teen chastity is on the rise — the percentage of high schoolers who said they’d ever had sexual intercourse dropped from 54 in 1991 to 46 in 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Teen pregnancies are down too. But that doesn’t mean teens aren’t having sex at all: more than half of seniors still lose their virginity before high-school graduation, Rosenberg reports. And teen condom use is up and so are levels of many STDs.
That leaves abstinence advocates and their opponents battling over the best approach. Though no parents really want their teenager to have sex, there’s plenty of disagreement over how to persuade kids to wait. Major medical groups and supporters of “comprehensive sex education” like the Sexuality Information and Education Council (SIECUS) agree abstinence should be promoted as a first choice. But they also want to teach kids how to reduce their risks if they do have sex.
But the real issue is personal choice. At the center of it all are the young people themselves, whose voices are often drowned out by the political cacophony, write General Editor Lorraine Ali and Correspondent Julie Scelfo. Newsweek talked to a number of teens about their decision to abstain from sex until marriage and found that while religion plays a critical role in their decision, there are other factors as well: caring parents, a sense of their own unreadiness, and the desire to gain some semblance of control over their own destinies.
By Lorraine Ali and Julie Scelfo
There’s a sexual revolution going on in America, and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with Christina Aguilera’s bare-it-all video “Dirrty.” The uprising is taking place in the real world, not on “The Real World.” Visit any American high school and you’ll likely find a growing number of students who watch scabrous TV shows like “Shipmates,” listen to Eminem — and have decided to remain chaste until marriage. Rejecting the get-down-make-love ethos of their parents’ generation, this wave of young adults represents a new counterculture, one clearly at odds with the mainstream media and their routine use of sex to boost ratings and peddle product.
According to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of high-school students who say they’ve never had sexual intercourse rose by almost 10 percent between 1991 and 2001. Parents, public-health officials and sexually beleaguered teens themselves may be relieved by this “let’s not” trend. But the new abstinence movement, largely fostered by cultural conservatives and evangelical Christians, has also become hotly controversial.
As the Bush administration plans to increase federal funding for abstinence programs by nearly a third, to $135 million, the Advocates for Youth and other proponents of a more comprehensive approach to sex ed argue that teaching abstinence isn’t enough. Teens also need to know how to protect themselves if they do have sex, these groups say, and they need to understand the emotional intensity inherent in sexual relationships.
The debate concerns public policy (page 67), but the real issue is personal choice. At the center of it all are the young people themselves, whose voices are often drowned out by the political cacophony. Some of them opened up and talked candidly to Newsweek about their reasons for abstaining from sex until marriage. It’s clear that religion plays a critical role in this extraordinarily private decision. But there are other factors as well: caring parents, a sense of their own unreadiness, the desire to gain some semblance of control over their own destinies. Here are their stories.
Alice Kunce says she’s a feminist, but not the “army-boot-wearing, shaved-head, I-hate-all-men kind.” The curly-haired 18-year-old Wellesley College sophomore — she skipped a grade in elementary school — looks and talks like what she is: one of the many bright, outspoken students at the liberal Massachusetts women’s college. She’s also a virgin. “One of the empowering things about the feminist movement,” she says, “is that we’re able to assert ourselves, to say no to sex and not feel pressured about it. And I think guys are kind of getting it. Like, ‘Oh, not everyone’s doing it’.”
But judging by MTV’s “Undressed,” UPN’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and just about every other TV program or movie targeted at teens, everyone is doing it. Alice grew up with these images, but as a small-town girl in Jefferson City, Mo., most teen shows felt alien and alienating. “You’re either a prudish person who can’t handle talking about sex or you’re out every Saturday night getting some,” she says. “But if you’re not sexually active and you’re willing to discuss the subject, you can’t be called a prude. How do they market to that?” The friend from back home she’s been dating since August asked not to be identified in this story, but Alice doesn’t mind talking candidly about what they do — or don’t do. “Which is acceptable? Oral, vaginal or anal sex?” she asks. “For me, they’re all sex. In high school, you could have oral sex and still call yourself a virgin. Now I’m like, ‘Well, what makes one less intimate than the other?’ ”
Alice, a regular churchgoer who also teaches Sunday school, says religion is not the reason she’s chosen abstinence. She fears STDs and pregnancy, of course, but above all, she says, she’s not mature enough emotionally to handle the deep intimacy sex can bring. Though most people in her college, or even back in her Bible-belt high school, haven’t made the same choice, Alice says she has never felt ostracized. If anything, she feels a need to speak up for those being coerced by aggressive abstinence groups. “Religious pressure was and is a lot greater than peer pressure,” says Alice, who has never taken part in an abstinence program. “I don’t think there are as many teens saying ‘Oh come on, everybody’s having sex’ as there are church leaders saying ‘No, it’s bad, don’t do it. It’ll ruin your life.’ The choices many religious groups leave you with are either no sex at all or uneducated sex. What happened to educating young people about how they can protect themselves?”
Karl Nicoletti wasted no time when it came to having “the talk” with his son, Chris. It happened five years ago, when Chris was in sixth grade. Nicoletti was driving him home from school and the subject of girls came up. “I know many parents who are wishy-washy when talking to their kids about sex. I just said, ‘No, you’re not going to have sex. Keep your pecker in your pants until you graduate from high school’.”
Today, the 16-year-old from Longmont, Colo., vows he’ll remain abstinent until marriage. So does his girlfriend, 17-year-old Amanda Wing, whose parents set similarly strict rules for her and her two older brothers. “It’s amazing, but they did listen,” says her mother, Lynn Wing. Amanda has been dating Chris for only two months, but they’ve known each other for eight years. On a Tuesday-night dinner date at Portabello’s (just across from the Twin Peaks Mall), Amanda asks, “You gonna get the chicken parmesan again?” Chris nods. “Yep. You know me well.” They seem like a long-married couple — except that they listen to the Dave Matthews Band, have a 10:30 weeknight curfew and never go beyond kissing and hugging. (The guidelines set by Chris’s dad: no touching anywhere that a soccer uniform covers.)
“Society is so run by sex,” says Chris, who looks like Madison Avenue’s conception of an All-American boy in his Abercrombie sweat shirt and faded baggy jeans. “Just look at everything — TV, movies. The culture today makes it seem OK to have sex whenever, however or with whoever you want. I just disagree with that.” Amanda, who looks tomboy comfy in baggy brown cords, a white T shirt and chunky-soled shoes, feels the same way. “Sex should be a special thing that doesn’t need to be public,” she says. “But if you’re abstinent, it’s like you’re the one set aside from society because you’re not `doing it’.”
The peer pressure in this town of 71,000 people in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains is substantially less than in cosmopolitan Denver, 45 minutes away. (“It figures you had to come all the way out here to find a virgin,” one local said.) Chris joined a Christian abstinence group called Teen Advisors this year. “We watched their slide show in eighth grade and it just has pictures of all these STDs,” he says. “It’s one of the grossest things you’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to touch a girl, like, forever.” He now goes out once a month and talks to middle schoolers about abstinence. Amanda saw the same presentation. “It’s horrible,” she says. “If that doesn’t scare kids out of sex, nothing will.” Could these gruesome images put them off sex for life? Chris and Amanda say no. They’re sure that whoever they marry will be disease- free.
To most abstaining teens, marriage is the golden light at the end of the perilous tunnel of dating — despite what their parents’ experience may have been. Though Amanda’s mother and father have had a long and stable union, Karl Nicoletti separated from Chris’s mother when Chris was in fifth grade. His fiancee moved in with Chris and Karl two years ago; Chris’s mother now has a year-and-a-half-old son out of wedlock. Chris and Amanda talk about marriage in the abstract, but they want to go to college first, and they’re looking at schools on opposite sides of the country. “I think we could stay together,” Chris says. Amanda agrees. “Like we have complete trust in each other,” she says. “It’s just not hard for us.” Whether the bond between them is strong enough to withstand a long-distance relationship is yet to be seen. For now, Chris and Amanda mostly look ahead to their next weekly ritual: the Tuesday pancake lunch.
Remaining a virgin until marriage is neither an easy nor a common choice in Latoya Huggins’s part of Paterson, N.J. At least three of her friends became single mothers while they were still in high school, one by an older man who now wants nothing to do with the child. “It’s hard for her to finish school,” Latoya says, “because she has to take the baby to get shots and stuff.”
Latoya lives in a chaotic world: so far this year, more than a dozen people have been murdered in her neighborhood. It’s a life that makes her sexuality seem like one of the few things she can actually control. “I don’t even want a boyfriend until after college,” says Latoya, who’s studying to be a beautician at a technical high school. “Basically I want a lot out of life. My career choices are going to need a lot of time and effort.”
Latoya, 18, could pass for a street-smart 28. She started thinking seriously about abstinence five years ago, when a national outreach program called Free Teens began teaching classes at her church. The classes reinforced what she already knew from growing up in Paterson — that discipline is the key to getting through your teen years alive. Earlier this year she dated a 21-year-old appliance salesman from her neighborhood, until Latoya heard that he was hoping she’d have sex with him. “We decided that we should just be friends,” she explains, “before he cheated on me or we split up in a worse way.”
So most days Latoya comes home from school alone. While she waits for her parents to return from work, she watches the Disney Channel or chills in her basement bedroom, which she’s decorated with construction-paper cutouts of the names of her favorite pop stars, such as Nelly and Aaliyah. She feels safe there, she says, because “too many bad things are happening” outside. But bad things happen inside, too: last year she opened the door to a neighbor who forced his way inside and attempted to rape her. “He started trying to take my clothes off. I was screaming and yelling to the top of my lungs and nobody heard.” Luckily, the phone rang. Latoya told the intruder it was her father, and that if she didn’t answer he would come home right away. The man fled. Latoya tries not to think about what happened, although she feels “like dying” when she sees her attacker on the street. (Her parents decided not to press charges so she wouldn’t have to testify in court.) Her goal is to graduate and get a job; she wants to stay focused and independent. “Boys make you feel like you’re special and you’re the only one they care about,” she says. “A lot of girls feel like they need that. But my mother loves me and my father loves me, so there’s no gap to fill.”
Even though she lives 700 miles from the nearest ocean, Daniela Aranda was recently voted Miss Hawaiian Tropic El Paso, Texas, and her parents couldn’t be prouder. They’ve displayed a picture of their bikini-clad daughter
smack-dab in the middle of the living room. “People always say to me ‘You don’t look like a virgin’,” says Daniela, 20, who wears supersparkly eye shadow, heavy lip liner and a low-cut black shirt. “But what does a virgin look like? Someone who wears white and likes to look at flowers?”
Daniela models at Harley-Davidson fashion shows, is a cheerleader for a local soccer team called the Patriots and hangs out with friends who work at Hooters. She’s also an evangelical Christian who made a vow at 13 to remain a virgin, and she’s kept that promise. “It can be done,” she says. “I’m living proof.” Daniela has never joined an abstinence program; her decision came from strong family values and deep spiritual convictions.
Daniela’s arid East El Paso neighborhood, just a mile or so from the Mexican border, was built atop desert dunes, and the sand seems to be reclaiming its own by swallowing up back patios and sidewalks. The city, predominantly Hispanic, is home to the Fort Bliss Army base, breathtaking mesa views — and some of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the nation. “There’s a lot of girls that just want to get pregnant so they can get married and get out of here,” Daniela says.
But she seems content to stay in El Paso. She studies business at El Paso Community College, dates a UTEP football player named Mike and works as a sales associate at the A’gaci Too clothing store in the Cielo Vista Mall. She also tones at the gym and reads — especially books by the Christian author Joshua Harris. In “Boy Meets Girl,” she’s marked such passages as “Lust is never satisfied” with a pink highlighter. She’s also saved an article on A. C. Green, the former NBA player who’s become a spokesman for abstinence. “My boyfriend’s coach gave it to him because the other guys sometimes say, ‘Are you gay? What’s wrong with you?’ It’s proof that if a famous man like Green can do it, so can he.”
Daniela has been dating Mike for more than a year. He’s had sex before, but has agreed to remain abstinent with her. “He’s what you call a born-again virgin,” she says. “Or a secondary abstinent, or something like that. We just don’t put ourselves in compromising situations. If we’re together late at night, it’s with my whole family.”
Daniela knows about temptation: every time she walks out onstage in a bathing suit, men take notice. But she doesn’t see a contradiction in her double life as virgin and beauty queen; rather, it’s a personal challenge. “I did Hawaiian Tropic because I wanted to see if I could get into a bikini in front of all these people,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to win.’ But I did, and I got a free trip to Houston’s state finals. I met the owner of Hawaiian Tropic. It’s like, wow, this is as good as it gets.”
Lenee Young is trying to write a paper for her Spanish class at Atlanta’s Spelman College, but as usual she and her roommates can’t help getting onto the subject of guys. “I love Ludacris,” Lene_ gushes. “I love everything about him. Morris Chestnut, too. He has a really pretty smile. Just gorgeous.” But Lenee, 19, has never had a boyfriend, and has never even been kissed. “A lot of the guys in high school had already had sex,” she says. “I knew that would come up, so I’d end all my relationships at the very beginning.” Lenee_ decided back then to remain a virgin until marriage, and even now she feels little temptation to do what many of her peers are doing behind closed dormitory doors. “I feel that part of me hasn’t been triggered yet,” she says. “Sex is one of those things you can’t miss until you have it.”
Last summer she went with a friend from her hometown of Pittsburgh to a Silver Ring Thing. These popular free events meld music videos, pyrotechnics and live teen comedy sketches with dire warnings about STDs. Attendees can buy a silver ring — and a Bible — for $12. Then, at the conclusion of the program, as techno music blares, they recite a pledge of abstinence and don their rings. “My friend, who’s also a virgin, said I needed to go so I could get a ring,” Lenee says. “It was fun, like the music and everything. And afterwards they had a dance and a bonfire.”
The idea of abstinence was not new to Lenee. In high school she participated in a program sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center called Postponing Sexual Involvement. Her mother had discussed it with her — once — the week before she left for college. Two of her closest friends are also virgins; the trio jokingly call themselves The Good Girls Club. But student life can sometimes be a shock to her sensibilities. “Another friend of mine and this guy were talking about how they didn’t use a condom. He said, ‘I like it raw.’ I was like, `Oh, my goodness’.”
And then there was the recent party that began with truth-or-dare questions. The first one: have you ever kissed a boy? Young was the only woman who said no, and everybody in the room was stunned. “Are you serious? We gotta find you a boyfriend!” But Lenee wasn’t embarrassed. “I don’t feel like I’ve missed out,” she says. “I just feel like my time will come.” Until then, she sports that shiny silver ring.
Lucian Schulte had always planned to wait until he was married to have sex, but that was before a warm night a couple of years ago when the green-eyed, lanky six-footer found himself with an unexpected opportunity. “She was all for it,” says Lucian, now 18. “It was like, ‘Hey, let’s give this a try’.” The big event was over in a hurry and lacked any sense of intimacy. “In movies, if people have sex, it’s always romantic,” he says. “Physically, it did feel good, but emotionally, it felt really awkward. It was not what I expected it to be.”
While the fictional teens of “American Pie” would have been clumsily overjoyed, Lucian, raised Roman Catholic, was plagued by guilt. “I was worried that I’d given myself to someone and our relationship was now a lot more serious than it was before,” he says. “It was like, ‘Now, what is she going to expect from me?'” Lucian worried, too, about disease and pregnancy. He promised himself never again.
Lucian, now an engineering major at the University of Alberta in Canada, is a “renewed virgin.” His parents are strong proponents of chastity, and he attended school-sponsored abstinence classes. But the messages didn’t hit home until he’d actually had sex. “It’s a pretty special thing, and it’s also pretty serious,” he says. “Abstinence has to do with ‘Hey, are you going to respect this person?'” He has dated since his high-school affair, and is now hoping a particular cute coed from Edmonton will go out with him. “But I’ll try to restrict myself to kissing,” he says. “Not because I think everything else is bad. But the more you participate with someone, the harder it’s going to be to stop.”
It’s not easy to practice such restraint, especially when those around him do not. Lucian lives in a single room, decorated with ski-lift tickets and a “Scooby-Doo” poster, in an all-male dorm, but he says most students “get hitched up, sleep around and never see each other again.” Meanwhile he does his best to push his own sexual urges from his mind. “I try to forget about it, but I have to say it sucks. Homework is a good thing to do, and going out for a run usually works.” He also goes to Sunday mass. Lucian figures he can hold out until he’s married, which he hopes will be by the time he’s 30. “I’m looking forward to an intimate experience with my wife, who I’ll truly love and want to spend the rest of my life with,” says Lucian. “It’s kind of corny, but it’s for real.”
With Sarah Downey and Vanessa Juarez
The Politics: The Bush administration wants to spend millions more selling teens on the virtues of virginity. Not everyone thinks that’s such a good idea.
By Debra Rosenberg
Karie Hughes tosses a pair of black fuzzy dice across the classroom floor. “Sex before marriage is like gambling,” Hughes tells students in her federally funded abstinence workshop, “Passion and Principles.” Each number on the dice represents a risk, Hughes explains — pregnancy, a sexually transmitted disease, a broken heart. Hughes, 42, is hip enough for her audience to relate to — she reveals a sliver of belly above her slim black pants — but authoritative enough to have an impact. By the time she darkens the room for the slide show at Highland High School outside Phoenix, Ariz., the kids are captivated. The screen fills with grotesque images — a uterus swollen by pelvic inflammatory disease, a penis oozing pus from gonorrhea. “Eeeeeew,” the students groan. Afterward, many seem persuaded. “That totally changed my view on pretty much everything,” says freshman Laura Hurst, 14. “Ohmigod.”
Phoenix isn’t the only place the abstinence message is taking hold. In classrooms around the country, programs that urge teens to postpone sex are on the rise. More than one third of U.S. high schools teach abstinence until marriage and 700 abstinence programs spread the sex-can-wait gospel in all 50 states. Next year George W. Bush hopes to boost abstinence spending to $135 million — up from $60 million in 1998 — fulfilling a campaign promise to spend as much on abstinence as on teen family-planning programs. Abstinence is such a big priority that it falls into the portfolio of top Bush political guru Karl Rove. It’s also one social issue the new Republican Congress is eager to advance. “There’s certainly nothing in the election results that will push this in another direction,” says Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook Jr.
Though no parents really want their teenager to have sex, there’s plenty of disagreement over how to persuade kids to wait. Major medical groups and supporters of “comprehensive sex education” like the Sexuality Information and Education Council (SIECUS) agree abstinence should be promoted as a first choice. But they also want to teach kids how to reduce their risks if they do have sex. “We have to look at the health harm of not using contraceptives,” says SIECUS president Tamara Kreinin, who contends that many abstinence programs spread fear and misinformation. Besides, there’s little research proving they work. Polls show that parents overwhelmingly favor the comprehensive approach, but the pro-abstinence forces have shown more political fervor.
The abstinence drive comes at a time when teen chastity is on the rise – – the percentage of high schoolers who said they’d ever had sexual intercourse dropped from 54 in 1991 to 46 in 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Teen pregnancies are down, too. But that doesn’t mean teens aren’t having sex at all: more than half of seniors still lose their virginity before high-school graduation. Teen condom use is up and so are levels of many STDs. That leaves abstinence advocates and their opponents battling over the best approach.
For teachers like Karie Hughes, building the case for abstinence goes beyond “just say no.” Even if you manage to avoid pregnancy, Hughes tells students, it’s harder to protect yourself against stealthy, often symptomless STDs that can crop up years later. Sexual intercourse isn’t the only danger. There’s now growing evidence that teens are engaging in other risky behaviors, including oral and anal sex. Both sides are trying to tackle the issue. Comprehensive sex-ed advocates want to offer kids explicit lessons on how to protect themselves with condoms and dental dams. And abstinence classes play up the hazards of deep kissing and mutual masturbation. “This teaches you ways to prevent yourself from doing stuff,” says Lindsey Raver, 17, sitting in the back row of Hughes’s class in hip-huggers and a pink V neck. “It gets you thinking.”
That’s just the kind of response George W. Bush was hoping for. To the White House, abstinence seems like an easy win: it resonates with conservative voters, but doesn’t upset pro-choice moderates. Rove, who’s responsible for shoring up support among the religious right, signaled the issue’s importance when he recently penned a personal letter to the president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, an educational and networking organization. Rove detailed how “we are pushing the policy agenda on abstinence,” stressed Bush’s commitment to the cause and promised “we will certainly come up with some increase in funding.” Rove wasn’t just pandering to a key constituency — the letter was official White House policy vetted by the president’s domestic-policy council. Bush foreign-policy advisers also want to expand abstinence in HIV-prevention efforts abroad, a move critics say may be too simplistic an answer to the spreading AIDS epidemic in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
At home, Bush has not only increased funding; he’s poured all the new federal dollars into the most restrictive type of abstinence program — Special Projects of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS) — more than doubling its budget to $73 million. To get the cash, groups must follow eight strict criteria, including teaching that “sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects” and “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.” By law, SPRANS programs cannot promote or endorse condom use. Many of the groups that won these grants in 2002 are faith-based, including anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers, Catholic charities and a Christian college. (The groups aren’t supposed to preach: in July a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the state’s abstinence program was illegally using federal money to promote religion.)
It often falls to Claude Allen to explain Bush’s philosophy. As deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, Allen is the administration’s point man on abstinence. Allen sees sex as just one more risky teen behavior to curb and argues that abstinence is the only way to reduce a teen’s risk to zero. “Condoms may be effective in preventing transmission of HIV/AIDS and, in some cases, transmission of gonorrhea in men, but beyond that they do not protect adequately against other sexually transmitted diseases,” he says. A 2001 report from the National Institutes of Health agrees with Allen about HIV and gonorrhea, but says there’s insufficient evidence to say whether condoms protect against other STDs. Lately, Allen has fought off criticism that politics prompted the CDC to delete a condom fact sheet from its official government Web site. He says the site is being revised to reflect the most recent research.
That’s little comfort to the comprehensive camp. When Human Rights Watch researcher Rebecca Schleifer studied abstinence programs in Texas, she found that they actually posed a threat to adolescent health. “They’re getting the message out that condoms don’t work,” Schleifer says. She concluded that the programs jolt kids with worst-case scenarios — like the gory slide show — but don’t prepare them to deal with their emerging sexuality. “It doesn’t really help you. It’s just trying to scare you,” says Hughes’s student Carol Lujan, 14.
Schleifer and others also worry that stressing abstinence until marriage ostracizes sexual-abuse victims who may not see themselves as virgins, gay kids who can’t legally marry and children from single-parent homes. It’s also unrealistic, says James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a comprehensive sex-ed group, at a time when the most recent study shows that more than 80 percent of Americans didn’t make it to their wedding night as virgins.
In many communities, parents are still wrestling with which side to take. When the Wake County, N.C., school board decided to review the abstinence curriculum, both sides began lobbying. Bart Frost, 15, and his mother, Pamela, showed up at one October meeting to press for comprehensive classes after Bart’s abstinence course left too many gaps. “There wasn’t anything to it,” he said. Last month, after a heated public hearing and a contentious 5-4 vote, the school board decided to keep an abstinence focus, but add information about contraceptives, STDs and tolerance for gays. Abstinence backers vow revenge at the next school-board election.
Although Bush has said he wants to fund only “scientifically proven” education programs, there’s so far little evidence to show abstinence works. “The jury is still out,” says Douglas Kirby, who chairs the task force on effective programs at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Many studies did not use sound research methodology or showed mixed outcomes, says Kirby. One study that followed students who took virginity pledges found the vows did delay sexual activity — but students who lapsed were less likely to use contraceptives. A federally sponsored evaluation of abstinence programs will provide some early data next year. Other early results suggest there won’t be a single answer. Stan Weed, a researcher who evaluates abstinence programs for many states, studied four Virginia courses and found that two lowered the rate of students losing their virginity by at least 65 percent. But two other programs didn’t seem to work at all.
At Flowing Wells High School in Tucson, Ariz., the sophomores clamor for the free “Sex Can Wait” pens in Pat Merrill’s abstinence class, but it’s still not clear whether the message will last any longer than the ballpoint ink. Merrill helps students identify “love languages” besides sex (like words of affirmation) and has them list “turn-ons” that focus on personality instead of proclivities. A poster on the wall depicts two teens in low-slung jeans with their zippers padlocked shut: put a lock on it, it advises. And that’s the big question: will they? That used to be a matter for parents to worry about. But as abstinence moves to the center of the political battleground, even the White House wants to know the answer.
When it comes to teens and sex, abstinence forces say the message is simple — don’t do it. The other side says give them all the facts — including how to use a condom. No wonder parents are confused.
But the truth is, there’s a lot of agreement among researchers about what you should say to your kids about sex — like the fact that teen sex is risky business. The research is clear that adolescents, especially girls, are more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) than older people, and that the earlier teens initiate sex, the more likely they are to get infected. Kids are also less likely to use a condom properly — condom slippage and leakage is higher in younger users.
Researchers also know more about STDs than they once did. They now know that the fastest spreading STD — human papillomavirus (HPV) — can cause cervical cancer, for example, and that some STDs are not curable. Teens who use both birth control and a condom can still get infected. Alternative behaviors, such as oral sex, are not safer, as many teens believe. Virtually all STDs that can be transmitted through intercourse can also be spread orally.
While the two sides disagree about how effective condom use is, there is agreement that condoms used consistently and correctly can protect what they cover. Both sides say that some STDs (genital herpes, syphilis, HPV) can cause lesions that may not be covered by a condom. Skin-to-skin contact with a lesion can spread the disease, even if someone is wearing a condom.
Beyond giving kids the facts, both sides say it’s important that parents talk to their kids about sex. Studies consistently show that parents can have a big impact on the decision to delay sex until their teen is older.
