Friday Aug 08, 2025

Abstinence-Only Sex Education

There's one guaranteed way to never get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted infection: not having sex. In the 1990s, the United States government expanded efforts to fund programs that taught adolescents this fact. Unfortunately, that funding came with a few restrictions—most notably, the programs weren't allowed to promote or demonstrate any type of contraception whatsoever. This week, June and Josh try to figure out how these abstinence-only until marriage sex education initiatives got so much traction for so long.

***IN EDINBURGH THIS WEEK? Get tickets to the play Josh is directing, THE BOY FROM BANTAY, by clicking here!***

EPISODE ART: A graph from a report commissioned by the United States government to study the effectiveness of four abstinence-only sex education programs. There is no meaningful difference in outcomes between those who participated in the program and those who didn't.

SOURCES:

"Budget Widens Teen-Pregnancy-Prevention Efforts" by Laura Meckler (The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2009)
"Clinton Fires Surgeon General Over New Flap" by Paul Richter and Marlene Cimons (Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1994)
History of Dedicated Federal Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs FY 1982-2019 from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
"Context counts: Long‐term sequelae of premarital intercourse or abstinence" by Nicole M. Else-Quest, Janet Shibley Hyde & John D. DeLamater (The Journal of Sex Research, 2005)
Full text of Section 510, the Separate Program for Abstinence Education
"Whatever Happened to the Adolescent Family Life Act?" by Rebecca Saul (Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, 1998)
"Clinton Frees $250 Million for Sex Abstinence Teaching" by Melissa Healy (Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1997)
"Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Programs" report, published by HHS in 2007
"Consequences of sex education on teen and young adult sexual behaviors and outcomes" by Laura Duberstein Lindberg & Isaac Maddow-Zimet (The Journal of Adolescent Health, 2012)
"Funding for Abstinence-Only Education and Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: Does State Ideology Affect Outcomes?" by Ashley M Fox, Georgia Himmelstein, Hina Khalid & Elizabeth A. Howell (American Journal of Public Health, 2019)
"Sex Education in Public Schools: Sexualization of Children and LGBT Indoctrination" by Cathy Ruse (Family Research Council, 2020)
"The History of Federal Abstinence-Only Funding" fact sheet (Advocates for Youth, 2007)
"Abstinence Education: Assessing the Evidence" by Christine C. Kim and Robert Rector (Heritage Foundation, 2008)

AUDIO CLIPS:

29:58 - Rush Limbaugh talking about Joycelyn Elders on an episode of the Rush Limbaugh Show ca. 1994
35:30 - Joycelyn Elders in an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project
1:04:03 - "Learn Gun Safety with Eddie Eagle" children's training video from the National Rifle Association (NRA)