Abstinence policies and adolescence realities: An update on science, politics, and human rights

Background: Many health professional organizations including APHA have recently issued statements questioning the scientific and ethical basis for United States federal programs and policies that promote abstinence-only education or abstinence-until-marriage programs.

Methods: This presentation will review new scientific findings and explore recent political developments with regard to abstinence-only education and will discuss the human rights and programmatic implications of these.

Results: A broad variety of scientific and ethical critiques have been directed towards US government policies that promote abstinence-only education focusing on issues such as medical accuracy, the withholding of life-saving information, insensitivity and unresponsiveness to sexually active youth and non-heterosexual youth, harm to comprehensive sexuality education and public health programs, damage to foreign aid programs, and inconsistency with ethical imperatives of public health. Recent studies have also suggested that the goal of abstinence-until-marriage is inconsistent with the demographic reality of a rising age at first marriage around the globe. Other analyses have examined the medical accuracy of commonly-used abstinence curricula and how medical information is misrepresented. Underlying ideological assumptions of abstinence program are often at odds with current scientific consensus; these assumptions are an important feature of the pseudoscience supporting abstinence-only policies. We anticipate these critiques will play an important role this year in Congressional debates over abstinence funding.

Conclusions: Abstinence promotion as supported by the US federal government raises serious scientific and human rights issues. Current federal policies and programs should be entirely reformed or abolished.