Seventeen and Counting…

by Julia Kaye, Program Assistant
National Women’s Law Center

Iowa Governor Chet Culver announced last week that the state will join the likes of Virginia, Arizona and Montana in rejecting federal funding for abstinence-only programs (last year Iowa received $320,000). Credit is due to FutureNet, Iowa’s statewide network of individuals and organizations collaborating on issues relating to adolescent pregnancy prevention, parenting, and sexual health; the group is said to have convinced the governor to reject the funds. 

Iowa is now number 17 on the list of states that have explicitly rejected or are not expected to apply for Title V funding. The number “17” is also, fittingly, the median age of sexual initiation. Considering that the average age of marriage is 25.8 for women and 27.4 for men, we are reminded again that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are sorely out of touch with reality and out of step with the American people, the majority of whom support comprehensive sex-education.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—oh, and scientists have said it before, and they’ll keep saying it, too: Abstinence-only programs do not lead adolescents to delay sexual initiation or limit their numbers of sexual partners, and abstinence-only education does not diminish rates of unintended teen pregnancy or sexually-transmitted infections among teens. Furthermore, many abstinence-only curricula contain false or misleading information, such as “a 43-day-old fetus is a ‘thinking person,’” “condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse,” or “as many as 10 percent of women who have an abortion become sterile.” And all abstinence-only-until-marriage programs—which teach that “sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects”—discriminate against gay and lesbian youth, for whom marriage is not an option, and against youth who will choose to remain single or engage in a domestic partnership, or whose parents are unmarried.

Criticizing the governor’s decision, Chuck Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center said that teenagers are not responsible enough to use contraception and should abstain from sex. This is an interesting statement coming from someone who thinks that adults are behaving responsibly by denying adolescents medically-accurate information about contraception that will allow them to protect themselves and their partners should the abstinence message not quite “get through to them.”