Among the numerous bits and pieces of miscellaneous spending in the current budget package was $133 million for abstinence programs to stop adolescents from having sex. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that President Bush “wants to focus on what works,” and as a result backs these kinds of education programs in preference to safe-sex programs. Some of this is no doubt motivated by the “moral majority” that so swiftly delivered President Bush to a second term, but there is an inherent intellectual appeal to these programs. If you do not have sex, you cannot get a sexually transmitted disease, or, for that matter, get pregnant. So how effective are these programs?

Depending on who you talk to, these programs are anywhere from completely ineffective to marginally more effective than the standard. Studies evaluating these programs in Minnesota and Maryland indicate that teaching abstinence to high school students is more or less useless if not offered in conjunction with normal safe-sex education, whereas studies with fifth-grade (!) students in seriously disadvantaged areas of Illinois imply that they are mildly effective or harmless. These are not compelling numbers, to say the least.

Looking at the title of a Heritage Foundation study of teen virginity pledgers—“Teens Who Make Virginity Pledges Have Substantially Improved Life Outcomes”—it is hard not to be at least somewhat warmer to these ideas. Sadly, studies of this kind provide very little compelling evidence that these programs are effective, even when adolescents are so convinced as to make a virginity pledge. When you control for the number of sexual partners the students had had in the survey, pledgers are in fact more likely on a per partner basis to have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, gotten pregnant and generally suffered all the problems that the Heritage Foundation would have one believe that abstinent teens are immune to. What’s more, the number of partners someone has can be more readily predicted by socio-economic factors than it can by any matrix of abstinence programs, pledges or the like. It seems that whether someone has sex while in high school or younger is largely a result of their upbringing or background.

To see why these programs are such a complete waste of time and public money, go to any number of abstinence websites. My favorite is www.days.org. To gauge the likely response of an oversexed, headstrong 15-year-old to such programs, I just turned my iTunes library back to the year 1997 and cruised around this website to a background of the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Missy Eliott and a bit of 2 Live Crew to make up for some of the crudity I’ve since lost. Seeing why these programs do not work is far, far too easy. The average teenager’s capacity to store gigabytes and gigabytes of porn has made the concept of “purity” something of an abstraction. I am not sure what this “purity” is, but I’m pretty sure it would have elicited laughter from a classroom full of schoolboys who spent their time e-mailing highlights from www.rotten.com to one another.

What is more disturbing is that the ideological bent of these programs makes them inimical to safe-sex programs. On the www.days.org website, a section on birth control tries to scare adolescents away from contraception by lying—stating that “The Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) contains a warning for every birth control pill and device: ‘Patients should be counseled that this product does not protect against HIV infection (Aids) sic or other sexually transmitted diseases.’” This is patently untrue—last time I checked, efforts to encourage use of condoms had had a remarkable effect in reducing HIV transmission rates. Not every birth control device is ineffective against STDs. As a matter of fact, some of them are very effective against most diseases. This kind of ideological screed weakens the effectiveness of safe-sex programs—those who do have sex after being exposed to an abstinence program are more likely to face pregnancy or an STD because they have no idea how to go about it in a risk-minimizing way. Then again, if you are a right-wing moralist, these people are going to hell for their sins, and whether they die in agony or spread their misery to others is of little concern to you.

So what is an appropriate response? Anyone over the age of 10 knows that if you do not have sex you cannot get pregnant or get an STD. If we want to have adolescents making informed, sensible decisions about sex then lecturing and moralizing is unlikely to be the best way to go about it. They need to make informed choices about sex, and to that end they should be made aware of the risks and the consequences. I didn’t quickly forget what certain STDs looked like in my safe sex class in school and do not take senseless risks as a result. These are not shock tactics but tactics that ensure that people are making fully informed choices. The only way to ensure the happiness and health of young people in America is to treat them like adults.

Alex Turnbull ’05 is an economics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.