Reverberating Bushfail

I've got a new piece up at The Guardian's CifA about the legacy of the Bush administration's tunnel-visioned focus on abstinence-only sex education. Hold onto your hats, Shakers...

"The data presented in this report indicate that many young persons in the United States engage in sexual risk behaviour and experience negative reproductive health outcomes." That is the very clinical and polite way a new Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report introduces its finding that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise.

This news is, of course, not really news at all. When former president George Bush was still pushing for more funding for abstinence-only sex education programmes in November 2007, it was immediately after a study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that comprehensive sex ed programmes – which included contraception information as an integral feature – were most effective at preventing teen pregnancy.

And that was six months after the Guttmacher Institute reported that "a nine-year, $8m evaluation of federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programmes found that these programmes have no beneficial impact on young people's sexual behaviour," and three years after congressman Henry Waxman requested a report (pdf) which found that over 80% of the [abstinence-only sex ed] curricula reviewed was found to contain "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health," effectively ensuring that pregnancy rates and STDs would rise.

Read the whole thing here.