Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #114120

Laura Duberstein Lindberg, PhD, Susheela Singh, and Lawrence B. Finer, PhD. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 120 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005, 212-248-1111, llindberg@guttmacher.org

Ongoing shifts in funding and policies towards a greater emphasis on abstinence-only education make it important to document changes in the prevalence, content and timing of sex education. Comparable measures in the 1995 (women only) and 2002 (men and women) National Surveys of Family Growth, and the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males, permit examination of trends in adolescents' receipt of formal instruction on two key sex education topics—abstinence and contraception. Preliminary results show that between 1995 and 2002, there were significant changes in the prevalence, content and timing of formal sex education. The share of adolescent females having received any formal instruction about birth control declined sharply from 87% to 70%. The proportion of adolescent females reporting receipt of abstinence education fell from 92% to 86%. Taken together these shifts resulted in significant declines in the comprehensiveness of female adolescents' sex education. From 1995 to 2002 the share receiving instruction about both birth control and abstinence declined from 84% to 65%. The share receiving instruction only about abstinence, and not birth control, increased from 8% to 21%. There was an increase from 5% to 9% in the share of adolescent females that received instruction in neither abstinence or birth control. Among sexually experienced females, about half did not receive instruction about birth control prior to first sex – nearly twice as many as in 1995. These substantial changes in the sex education received by adolescents have potentially grave implications for adolescent health, disease transmission and pregnancy prevention.

Learning Objectives: