An article I read today (Critics Give Health Textbooks a Failing Grade (Houston Chronicle)) made me wonder if we, as Christians, really are doing the right thing when it comes to abstinence education. As much as I think abstinence education should be taught and promoted by society, I sometimes wonder if Christians aren’t doing themselves (and society) a disservice by attempting to limit forms of traditional sex education in the classroom.

So I wonder, is this really wise? Should we be promoting school textbooks that don’t contain any kind of contraception education? My fiance√© is an OB/GYN (and is the one that initially got me thinking about this), and on the side she works with a crisis pregnanacy center that helps people consider other options besides abortions. Part of her assistance to the center includes answering emails from people seeking medical advice, and the constant theme in the questions she receives is one from a scared teenage girl writing or calling, wanting to know if the “heat-of-the-moment” unprotected sex she had with her boyfriend will result in a pregnancy, and what she should do about it. At the the point that this girl has made an inquiry like this to the center, abstinence educated or not, she has a potential problem. Had she used contraception, in spite if it’s failure rate, she probably would have less to be anxious about (which is where continuing abstinence education would again pick up where contraception left off). These are indeed complicated matters, and ones that people feel very strongly about, but consider the following:

• Virgin teens ‘have same STD rate’: A study of 12,000 American teens finds that the STD rate of those who made abstinence pledges and violated the pledge vs. those who didn’t make the pledge at all were “statistically the same”. For this to be true, it strongly implies that the pledgers who violated their pledge, used contraception less frequently (which the study states clearly, but the article does not).

• Report Shows Abstinence-Only Education Program Not More Effective. An independent review of abstinence-only education in Minnesota reveals that the number of teens who had sex in junior high school doubled among those who participated in abstinence-only education.

• Sex Education | Introduction?

• A 2002 Hertiage Foundation paper on abstinence education.

I believe that abstinence is the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and prevent the transmission of STDs, if the participants actively practice abstinence. If they don’t actively practice it, well, studies seem to showing what I think should be obvious: teens who make the pledge and don’t practice it get pregnant and/or STDs at virtually the same rate as teens who don’t make such a pledge. But while abstinence may the only way to prevent these problems, abstinence-only education may not necessarily be the only way to approach sex education, and this could be an important difference.

Here’s my potential issue with abstinence-only education (not abstinence itself): if teens are still behaving the same after having made a pledge, then the making of the pledge is not preventing what such education claims to prevent. It doesn’t mean actually being abstinent doesn’t work, it means making a pledge to be abstinent, in and of itself, doesn’t work. And if it’s making such a pledge doesn’t work, then are we denying the nation’s youth of other means to prevent pregnancies and STDs? Are we potentially creating more work for ourselves as Christians, and as a society, by denying teens access to traditional sex education and having to deal with increased occurrences of the natural outcomes of sex (pregnancies - which result in abortions, or children, or an increased welfare roll, etc. - and STDs), instead of promoting both and attacking the problem from multiple angles? It seems we are looking to abstinence-only education as a “magic-bullet” or vaccination against undesired outcomes, when it may be true that a moral and practical educational “cocktail” might be a more effective solution.

I’ve always taken the position that many other common forms of sex education tacitly encourage teens to have sex on some level, because the sacredness of sex is often debunked or otherwise ignored. And, I’ve nearly convulsed when I’ve seen what I think is a very dangerous educational track applied to young children, as has been proposed in England. Besides that fact, numerous studies have shown that increased frequency of sex in youth and before marriage lead to a higher divorce rate in adulthood, (here is a decent list of sources). For those reasons alone I believe abstinence education should be a part of the curriculum. But, perhaps we should be doing both. Is it really anti-Biblical to do so? I’m not sure it is.

But given the current state of society and abstinence-only education, given the higher rate of unprotected sex for those not keeping the pledge, it seems as if it is not working. Teens need to be held accountable and made to understand that having sex has numerous consequences beyond the physical pleasure of it all, but in a society where the structures to reinforce this don’t really exist in any sort of pervasive way, except for people in active religious communities, are we expecting too much from only one educational track? I am wondering aloud if we may be.

I think abstinence-only education would be more effective, if society had two very important adjutant structures to uplift those who make such pledges: 1) support groups for non-religious teens that will see them into adulthood, that teens will actually participate in, and 2) rites-of-passage into adulthood. The first, various groups are trying to do, but the second I believe is actually more important. Our youth have no rites-of-passage to look forward to as adults except for getting drunk at 21, because we’ve sacrificed them entirely on the altar of political correctness. Without rites-of-passage, actually pledging abstinence doesn’t have a concrete societal reward (it has many personal rewards to the person you are marrying) besides the knowledge that you probably will be less likely to get divorced.

So, what do we do? Do we provide abstinence-only education and try to build those other structures as we go (which strikes me as just a bit too Christian Reconstructionist for my tastes), or, do we acknowledge we live in a pluralistic society, and compromise on the method we choose (which would include abstinence education) to reach a goal everyone can live with?