how effective is "teaching abstinence"?

Excerpts from an article by Deborah Katz in U.S. News & World Report...

To prevent teen pregnancy, should students be taught only the merits of abstaining from sex? Or should they also learn about contraception, just in case? Believers on both sides are facing off again, after a government announcement in early December that teen birthrates rose 3 percent last year following a 14-year decline.

Some public-health experts blame increasingly popular sex-ed programs that preach abstinence only and keep kids in the dark about other pregnancy-prevention methods: A study published recently in the American Journal of Public Health attributed most of the 14-year birthrate drop to wider contraceptive use. "Abstinence-only programs are ideology driven," says Marilyn Keefe, director of reproductive health and rights at the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, "and not a good use of our public-health dollars."

Abstinence advocates, meanwhile, are crying foul, saying the uptick in pregnancies is a sign that a stronger pitch for delaying sex is needed. "Any kind of assertion of blame is a disingenuous attempt to turn these statistics into a political agenda," insists Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. Even with more schools teaching the benefits of abstinence, she says, most still emphasize contraceptive techniques over waiting. Huber believes the purist approach is bound to lead to less sex among teens.

The latest research suggests otherwise, however. A study released in April by Mathematica Policy Research looked at four "promising" sex-ed programs that advocate postponing all sexual activity until marriage and emphasize the social, emotional, and health benefits that can be gained from abstinence. What it found is that the teens in these programs were no more likely to delay their first sexual experience, have fewer partners, or use condoms than their peers who didn't have a sex-ed class.

More encouraging are the data on comprehensive education programs, which show that some do delay first encounters and improve contraceptive use, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. In order to be effective, though, a program must convince teens that avoiding sex or using condoms is the right thing to do, as opposed to just laying out the risks and benefits. And that's not easy. "There are probably thousands of efforts underway to prevent teen pregnancy, but we identified only 15 that seemed to help," says Sarah Brown, chief executive officer of the organization, whose analysis included 116 programs previously studied in published journal articles. "Most haven't even been evaluated in research studies."

Having no standard curricula for sex-education programs means huge variations in how they're taught and what impact they have....

A Christian worldview does not yield an optimal approach to this issue-- in terms of how one would ideally instruct those "in the world".

Within the Church, the answer is quite clear on most aspects of this debate: abstinence (and quite limited "sexual contact") outside of marriage and wonderfully free sexual lives within a marital relationship. That said, there are significant debates about the extent of sexual contact before marriage, the pros and cons of dating and courtship, the ethics of birth control, and so on.

For those within the world, Christians would not want to incite sin or tempt others to sin. But we would recognize that "morality" without relationship with God is largely futile-- a non-issue within one's salvation (Rom 3:23, 6:23, Eph 2:8-9) and difficult to accomplish or motivate without that relationship.

To the extent that one makes an effort, the best one can do is to encourage people to act more morally because it is in their self-interests. Christians take on faith (along with a lot of evidence) that what God says is best. If He is a Benevolent God, then doing what He tells us (what we should and should not do) is in our best interests-- not to jerk our chain or play the role of Cosmic Killjoy. Of course, convincing "non-believers" about this is far easier said than done. So, the second-best is trying to point to concrete, practical costs (larger compared to whatever limited benefits exist) of engaging in harmful behavior.

To an economist, all of this also points to one more reason for promoting "school choice". School choice would promote all sorts of approaches-- and we'd have a better idea of what works within any given context. Moreover, and most important, parents would have choice about what their kids were taught.