Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Abstinence: Just the facts, BMGers

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I propose we take a look at the report from MPR, Inc.. For the sake of trying to have a more civil dialog — one that might even bring about greater understanding of those who disagree with you — let’s limit citations to this one report. There is enough in there that I think all sides will have some data to help make their points. We can call it MRP-only.  đŸ™‚

I’ll start.  Two statements in the conclusion (p. 83) struck me:

The main objective of Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs is to teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage. The impact results from the four selected programs show no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.

…

Some policymakers and health educators have questioned the Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs, believing that the focus on abstinence may put teens at risk of having unprotected sex. The evaluation findings suggest that this is not the case. Program and control group youth did not differ in their rates of unprotected sex, either at first intercourse or over the last 12 months.

This suggests to me that neither program is as good or as bad as supporters and opponents might have you believe. One unanswered question is what impact extending the abstinence-only programs into the high school might have.

When I taught high school the pressures of having sex were right there on the surface. Do kids need a safe place to support one another’s decision to remain abstinent? I think this would be an excellent use of this grant.

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  1. This took 10 minutes on Google.  First, something on abstinence itself:

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    Young people who took an abstinence pledge were one-third less likely to use contraception when they did become sexually active

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    Now, moving on to a-o programs in schools, state studies in Minnesota, Texas, Arizona, and Pennsylvania found A-O programs had no impact on student behavior.

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    source (PDF)

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    Another peer-reviewed article:

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    Both reviews demonstrated that comprehensive sexuality education effectively promoted abstinence as well as other protective behaviors. Among 28 studies of comprehensive programs evaluated in the Kirby review, nine were able to delay initiation of sexual intercourse, 18 showed no impact, and one hastened initiation of sex.

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    In contrast to the positive impact in delaying sexual intercourse seen with some comprehensive sexuality programs, Kirby found no scientific evidence that abstinence only programs demonstrate efficacy in delaying initiation of
    sexual intercourse. Kirby found only three studies evaluating the impact of five different abstinence-only curricula that met minimal criteria for inclusion in the systematic review. No new study results have changed this conclusion.

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    Source (PDF)

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    A UCSF report also mentions some a-o propaganda:

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    a report commissioned by the Consortium of State Physicians Resource Councils lists six studies that the Consortium says point to positive effects of the abstinence only approach. Yet only one of these studies is a peer-reviewed published journal article issued in the last ten years.

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    The most rigorous study of an abstinence-only
    program reviewed in Emerging Answers studied the outcomes of the Postponing Sexual Involvement (PSI) curriculum, a five-session program taught by adults or peers that was implemented in California.46 Although ultimately finding
    that the PSI program was unlikely the cause, the study found that students enrolled in PSI who received instruction from peers were more likely to report becoming pregnant or causing a pregnancy. The study concluded that the program
    had no measurable impact on the initiation of sex, the frequency of sex, or the number of sexual partners.

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    Source (PDF)

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    From U-Maryland Baltimore:

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    In summary, the literature shows that abstinence-only programs have not been proven effective in preventing teen pregnancy. Comprehensive programs, on the other hand, have demonstrable evidence of their effectiveness, and have not been shown to increase sexual
    behavior among adolescents. As one public health expert concludes, “The belief in abstinence education is based on ideology, not science”
    (45).

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    Source (PDF).

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    The seminal work in this field is done by a Douglas Kirby of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. 

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    So there you have it folks.  While comprehensive sex education has a notable positive impact on teen pregnancy and contraction of STDs, abstinence-only has at best no notable impact.

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    Where do you want to spend your money?  (If you say the second, you agree with a whopping 17% of people, according to the final study.)

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    The verdict: comprehensive sex ed works.  If you don’t want to give a child the opportunity to best learn how to protect him/herself: ask him/her to be excused from the class.  Other children need and deserve that knowledge.

    • Given this comment, and subsequent 6 ratings, I’ll assume I wasn’t clear.

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      Spending 10 minutes on Google does not analysis make. I don’t think there is much to be gained from Googling and grabbing snippits of reports. That has been the mode of operation on the other threads, and the result was more of a battle of search engine technique than a substanative discussion.

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      I was hoping for something more in depth by focusing on one report. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m still reading that one.

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      I suggested the MPR report specifically because it came from the Bush adminstration AND was embraced by BMGers as an accurate and damning report on A-O.

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      If you want to suggest a different source, I’m game, but I would still like to suggest we stick to one neutral source and actually read it fully and discuss.

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      I’m not familiar with Mathematica, but the report itself seemed fairly emotion-free. siecus is definitely agenda driven. Not saying that’s bad; just saying it is and therefore would not exactly contribute to a balanced debate.

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      The JAH article opens with:
      We believe that abstinence-only education programs, as defined by federal funding requirements,are morally problematic,…

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      Again, I would have a hard time reading this as unbiased.

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      The abstince.pdf doc is a summary of research, but most is opinion. It’s more like a book report. So, we’d have to go out to its referenced sources to see the data.  The MPR report includes its data and methodology. So, I think it’s a better source for the purposes I outlined above.  What say you?

      • MPR examined 4 out of 700 programs used under this law.  If you want to look for a decent, neutral report, I doubt it’s this one.

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        • This morning, I read through one of the sources you cited. It was the one titled “Abstinence and abstinence-only education: A review of U.S. policies and programs” to see if maybe I could salvage part of this discussion.

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          Anyway, I came upon page 5:

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          Both Manlove and Kirby identified the lack of rigorously
          evaluated programs as a major problem in evaluating the
          effectiveness of abstinence-only education.

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          and later (emphasis mine)…

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          A rigorous national evaluation of abstinence-only education is currently being conducted by Mathematica Policy
          Research, Inc.           with support from the DHHS?s Office of the
          Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (OASPE)

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          I offer this up only as evidence that I had no pro-Bush agenda is selecting this report, it wasn’t that I was cherry-picking a report that would paint a rosy picture for A-O. I suggested this particular report for the reasons I previously stated.

      • This oughta do the trick:

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        Spending 10 minutes on Google does not analysis make. I don’t think there is much to be gained from Googling and grabbing snippits of reports. That has been the mode of operation on the other threads, and the result was more of a battle of search engine technique than a substanative discussion.

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        Translation:  The facts you have presented don’t conform with my worldview.  I don’t like them.  And although I have access to the full report, I’d rather mock your use of Google as a distraction.

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        I was hoping for something more in depth by focusing on one report. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m still reading that one.

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        Translation:  I was hoping that I would be able to find one report that says A-O programing is highly effective so that I could copy and paste the points I like in order to make the one report look like THE definitive authority.

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        If you want to suggest a different source, I’m game, but I would still like to suggest we stick to one neutral source and actually read it fully and discuss.

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        Translation:  I would prefer to ignore all the other reports that savage A-O programming and concentrate, instead, on the Bush Administration report because I like that one.  I will call it neutral, too, because you’ll like that. 

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        I’m not familiar with Mathematica, but the report itself seemed fairly emotion-free. siecus is definitely agenda driven. Not saying that’s bad; just saying it is and therefore would not exactly contribute to a balanced debate.

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        Translation:  The reports  with results I don’t like I’ll label as “agenda driven.”  (Don’t be distracted by the fact that the “agenda” is actually reducing teen pregnancy, so look at that bright shiny thing over there!!!!)  I don’t want a report that actually demonstrates what works in reducing teen pregnancy unless that report is “balanced,” meaning A-O fares well. 

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        The JAH article opens with:
        We believe that abstinence-only education programs, as defined by federal funding requirements,are morally problematic,…

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        Translation:  If they actually said that A-O education was NOT morally problematic, I’d like it better.

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        The abstince.pdf doc is a summary of research, but most is opinion. It’s more like a book report. So, we’d have to go out to its referenced sources to see the data.

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        Translation:  I don’t like the results in this pdf, so I’ll dismiss the report by trivializing it as a “book report.”  We’ll ignore the actual facts contained therein  because I suspect they’re not going to support my POV. 

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        The MPR report includes its data and methodology.

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        Translation:  The MPR report is the Bush Administration report, so that’s the one I wanna use, okay? 

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        That concludes tonight’s translation.  It is time to go read Christopher Hitchens’ new book.  đŸ™‚

  2. But since the average age of marriage in Mass is 27, what do people do in the 10 years between high school and marriage, considering the freedoms gained in college and one’s early twenties?

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    Since, as you stated, abstinence only doesn’t cut down on kids haaving sex (safer sex or otherwise), where are people going to learn the facts?

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    One day a kid is 17 under a parents guardianship, the next day he or she wakes up 18, in an adult body, with adult desires, adult pressures, adult liberties, and thrust into adult situations. When exactly should a person be educated on the alternatives to abstinence from intercourse until marriage? Or do you think it is realistic that we expect people to abstain from all sexual activity until they’re almost 30?

  3. According to my research there has never been a case of pregnancy by someone practicing abstinence.  Actually, there is one, but I don’t wish to change the conversation to Jesus.

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    Source: Common sense and a quick reminder from Kevin Wall (covering for Jay Severin on 96.9)

    • …we could cut hand gun murders and violence to zero.  If no one got married, the divorce rate ould be zero.  If we didn’t have cars, there’d be no deaths by automobile accident.  If we didn’t have schools, there’d be no school shootings.

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      Abstain from sex all you want. No one is forcing you to have sex.

    • here, for instance.  i guess we need to define abstinence very carefully.  for some, it just means no penile-vaginal intercourse.  under that definition, pregnancy can certainly still occur.  sperm is quite motile, and can enter the vagina without penile assistance if it is released or applied near enough.  given this, could you please provide your definition of abstinence so that we know we’re all on the same page?  does it mean no sexual activity whatsoever?  if you wish to use terms like “heavy petting” in your definition, please define them too, as I believe their definitions are rather fluid.

        • Yours is a good reminder that it takes two to abstain.  Men get raped too, it should be remembered.  It is perhaps less common, but two men I know had their first heterosexual encounter via an uninvited sodomizing female.

            • in both cases it was at the hands of female friends.  in one case, it was a gay man at the beach at night with his other drunk high school buddies.  he was known to be gay, yet a female classmate sodomized him.  when i met him 10 years later, he was still disturbed by the incident.  the other guy was straight, but the situation was similar – bunch of drunk young people out very late.  in both cases there was tremendous peer pressure – masculinity pressure i guess you could call it – for the guy getting raped to just let it happen, since having a woman “service” them, even though they didn’t ask for it or want it, proved something manly.  although the second guy was straight, he was also disturbed by the occurrence years later.  he had been a virgin and had not wanted to have sex with that woman at that time.

    • There’s also the virgin birth of the god Mithra.  Yep, born of a virgin mother, killed, and resurrected before ascending to take his rightful place.  Sound familiar?  Half of Christianity is merely warmed over Mithraism (a branch of Zoroastrianism favored by Roman soldiers occupying the Levant).

      • December 25! What a shocking coincidence that there are two virgin births on December 25th.

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        Oh and Horus and Dionysus were born of virgins, too.

        • …sun god that are extant, all of whose birthdays correspond to the winter solstice, for obvious reasons.

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          BTW, the death and resurrection of the sun god is hardly limited to christianity.  Osiris, for example, in Egyptian folklore.  That myth was a staple of early religion, and was obviously another solstice myth.

          • …the death and resurrection of the sun god was not exactly a solstice myth.  It had to do with planting season: when it was appropriate to plant crops.  Fertility.  It took several months of insolation for the land to be appropriate for that.  Hence the “easter bunny.”  That’s the easter myth.

            • Ra & Khepri are the sun gods (and others – they all seem to get amalgamated at various times.  ok, for all i know, osiris might be part of this pile-on).  Interestingly (to me as a casual entomologist), I recently learned that Khepri is depicted as a scarab beetle for the following reason

              The typical scarab was modeled after several species in the Family Scarabaeidae, but primarily the common Egyptian dung-beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, and its various subspecies. There were numerous variants of the sacred stout-bodied beetles. By observing the physical differences between actual beetles and the way in which they appear as scarabs, the types used as models can often be identified.

              In the minds of the Egyptians the efficacy of the amulet was based on the habits of the actual beetle. The Greek writer, Plutarch (ca. AD 40-120), described their asexual perception of the beetle:

                One accepts (with the ancient Egyptians), that these varieties are only male beetles, that they put down their seed substance (semen) which forms a ball and the beetle rolls it forward with its widely spaced hind legs so that the beetle imitates the path of the sun as it went down in the west and rose in the east in the mornings.

              However, in reality the male and female often work together and it is the female which, after dropping her eggs in the ground, covers them in excrement on which the larvae feed. As the soft dung ball is rolled across the ground, dust and sand attached to it so that it became hardened and was sometimes equal in size to the beetle. Without a doubt in the mind of the unknowing Egyptian this was a thought provoking and impressive achievement that imitated the daily appearance of the sun. This observation prompted the Egyptians to associate the beetle with one of the many aspects of the great sun-god, that of the rising sun, Khepri.

              The magical sense of the scarab as an amulet was reinforced through a play on the name it was given. The Egyptian name for the dung-beetle was hprr, “rising from, come into being itself,” close to the word hpr, with the meaning “to become, to change.” The word hprr later became hpri, the divine name Khepri, given to the Creation god, who represented the young rising sun.

              The name Khepri was often included as one of the five great names in the titulary of the king. Khepri was identified with the sacred beetle, Kheper, in life style and in being self-created. Khepri is often shown as a man with a beetle head or surmounted by a beetle or as a beetle. Kheper, the sacred beetle, was believed the reincarnation of Khepri, the sun-god, being reborn each morning as the young sun, newly emerged out of the earth. Khepri, with the great sun-disk before him, would be energized in the other world each morning and roll the sun disk onto the horizon at sunrise and across the sky, just as the beetle rolled its dung ball over the horizon on the earth and buried it in the sands. As the earthly symbol of an aspect of the great life-giving sun, Kheper was identified with spontaneous creation, regeneration, so closely associated with eternal existence.

              A parallel idea of the god is with the newly born, completely formed beetles, which appeared to come out of the dung ball as self generated creatures springing forth full of life. According to the story of the Creation, Khepri says, “I developed myself from the primeval matter which I made, I developed myself out of the primeval matter.” This was viewed as a sign of eternal renewal and reemergence of life, a reminder of the life to come. It signified to the Egyptians the descent under the earth, in the tomb, which was only a prologue to rebirth and the endlessness of life. Life and death were in a continual cycle.

              • The birth and death of the fertility god is not necessarily linked to the birth of the sun god.  My error, and I appologize.

                • Yet another early morning discussion of Egyptian theology here!  What is it with you people?

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                  I’ve always found Osiris fascinating because he was the central figure of one of the strongest changes in a religion.  As time wore on, particularly after the widespread dissemination of the Book of the Dead, Osiris kept gaining more and more prominence.  Though he was never moved from the underworld to the sun, the Cult of Osiris elevated him as the greatest of the gods, outshining if you will Ra.  So while he was never the sun god, he in many ways gained the place and powers of the sun god as Egyptian religion developed.

                • …these myths were not unique to the various middle-eastern religions, and certainly not unique to christianity.  One can find analogies to almost all of the Hebrew myths in other religious traditions.

  4. This issue has been sliced, diced, broiled, and braised.  You simply don’t like the outcome–and that’s okay.  But let’s not pretend that a substantive discussion of this issue hasn’t occurred.  It has–over and over and over and over again. 

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    Your solution is called exempt your child.  Did you even read the Mass General Law I provided you so that you would be relieved of your ignorance on the responsibilities of school districts and school committees vis a vis sex education? 

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    If you want your kid to have abstinence-only education, exempt your kid from the comprehensive sex eduation program s/he might be receiving in school. Period.  The end.  You cannot and will not force your puritanical views that value the withholding of information on other children.  Stick a fork in it; it’s done. 

  5. …public schools have been trying to socialize children for a number of decades, maybe even for over a century.  That is one reason why the Roman Catholic Church, Inc (RCCi) set up their parochial schools: they believed (rightly so) that the public schools were too “Protestant” orienated.  Moreover, at least in the 1950s, high school students were shown films about “how to date” (obviously people of the opposite sex.)

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    As far as I’m concerned, public schools should get out of the busines of proselytizing.  Obviously, they won’t.

    • As far as I’m concerned, public schools should get out of the busines of proselytizing.  Obviously, they won’t.

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      I hope this means you don’t want schools proselytizing a secular humanist progressive viewpoint either. Schools should do one thing.  And one thing only.

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      Teach Reading, Writing, Arithimetic, Science, and History.  Thats about it.  No social engineering nada.  Sex Education when it gives more than, this is a penis, this is a vagina, if you put the penis in the vagina you can impregnate a woman, is social engineering.  Thanks for agreeing.

      • …you aren’t able to distinguish between

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        (i) if you insert penis into vagina, and you might result in a fetus, and

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        (ii) you shouldn’t insert penis into vegina, because you might result in a fetus

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        but I’m really not. 

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        Not surprised, that is.  The first is teaching facts.  The second is social engineering.

      • So is all social engineering bad?  Or is only the social engineering that conflicts with your Republican view point bad?

        • …do you disagree that abstinence-only until marriage is what you would describe as social engineering? 

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          Should we also not allow schools to enforce dress codes, because teaching children what’s appropriate to wear in a classroom setting sounds like social engineering?  Should we eliminate classes that prepare kids on proper job interview decorum, becuase that’s social engineering?

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          Should we take the Pledge of Allegiance, the daily social engineering of young patriots, out of the class, too? Or should we only take out what you would consider “secular humanist” social engineering?

  6. … have a consensus of what reports and studies should be ‘worthy’, you already have a method.  Its called peer review.  It is how science is separated from junk. 

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    And no… when 99 reviewers mostly agreeing with a study and a 100th trashing it does not give one license to justify misleading caveats like “while many disagree..” or “while there is controversy…” ala politicians on climate change.

    • Peer review has its uses, but peer review of a single paper should be taken with a grain of salt.  Peer review has its uses, but it is not a guarantee of authoritativeness.  It depends on the extent to which the peers do their reviews.  Some reviewers review the experimental data.  Some go to the extent of checking the calculations.  Some only check the list of citations.  Whether or not a conclusion from peer-reviewed papers are correct can be amplified by the number of peer-reviewed papers that come to the same conclusion.

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      BTW, “Not even wrong” is not an assessment of your comment.  It is the famous phrase of Wolfgang Pauli (he of the Pauli Exclusion Principle), who famously wrote of a paper he was reviewing “However, this was not his most severe criticism, which he reserved for theories or theses so unclearly presented as to be untestable or unevaluatable, and thus not properly belonging within the realm of science, even though posing as such. They were worse than wrong because they could not be proven wrong. Famously, he once said of such an unclear paper: “It is not even wrong.”.

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