NY says no to abstinence only sex ed

September 21, 2007
New York Just Says No to Abstinence Funding

By JENNIFER MEDINA
New York is rejecting millions of dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, the state health commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, announced yesterday. The decision puts New York in line with at least 10 other states that have decided to forgo the federal money in recent years.

New York has received roughly $3.5 million a year from the federal government for abstinence-only education since 1998. The abstinence program was approved as part of welfare overhauls under the Clinton administration and was expanded and restructured under President Bush.

In a statement posted on the Health Department’s Web site, Dr. Daines said, “The Bush administration’s abstinence-only program is an example of a failed national healthcare policy directive.” He added that the policy was “based on ideology rather than on sound scientific-based evidence that must be the cornerstone of good public healthcare policy.”

The state had also spent $2.6 million annually to fund the same programs over the last decade. That money will now be spent on other existing programs for sex education, Dr. Daines said in an interview.

Supporters of abstinence-only education said it should remain an option. “We’ve seen a lot of attacks on this program,” said Leslee Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, based in South Dakota. “A lot of kids that are abstaining are made to feel as if they are from a Victorian age and they are not with the ‘Sex and the City’ crowd.”

Dr. Daines’s announcement came the same day that the New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposes abstinence-only education, released a report detailing the number of such programs in the state. The report stated that roughly half of the groups teaching abstinence in the state were religious groups and that the state had done almost nothing to monitor them.

Dr. Daines said that existing state programs include discussion of abstinence. But he said the state made the decision based on evidence that the abstinence-only program did little to prevent teen pregnancies. He said he also objected to the program’s “narrow ideological view, which is not the direction we want to go in for sexual health.” He said the state should encourage the teaching of the use of condoms and include discussions of abstinence.

Congress is expected to take up funding for abstinence-only education at the end of the month. California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island are among the states that have rejected such money.

According to the civil liberties union report, New York was second only to Texas in the amount of money it received for abstinence education. The federal government also gives roughly $6 million directly to community groups in New York for such programs, according to the report.

Sex education is not mandated by New York State, which leaves it to individual districts to adopt their own curriculum.

In July, the Health Department sent letters to nearly 40 community organizations and hospitals that had received the funding, stating that their contracts would not be renewed. The letter did not mention why the contracts were being canceled.

“We think it is a good thing that they are making efforts to close programs that were misinforming adolescents,” said Galen Sherwin, the director of the Reproduction Rights Project for the New York Civil Liberties Union, who wrote the report . “But there is still a long way to go before you get to comprehensive, medically sound sex education.”

Both Dr. Daines and Ms. Sherwin cited recent studies, including one by the federal Government Accountability Office, which concluded that abstinence programs have not proven to be effective and have sometimes taught teens inaccurate medical information about sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.