Abstinence Education: Just Stating the Facts

By Joey Francis | July 29, 2008

Hey everybody! I hope you are doing well… Today I was, as usual, browsing through the internet reading what the world is saying about abstinence education. Just in case you didn’t know this but there are a lot of people who do not think that it is effective, in fact a lot of them say that it is making the current situations of teenage pregnancy and STD’s even worse.

Worth the Wait is located in Reno, NV. So I decided to dig into the internet and find some statistics to see how negatively abstinence ed is really effecting our state. In the past year we have spoken to over 13 thousand students in the northern Nevada area. So obviously we haven’t gotten the opportunity to speak with every student, but we have talked to a lot of them. So I looked up the differences in the results of the Nevada Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 2005 and 2007. I think the results show that Abstinence education is not harming the current situations, and it actually may be helping, although that is contrary to what the media is telling us.

So here is the statistics which I found regarding teens and their sexual choices…

  1. The amounts of teen who have had sexual intercourse has decreased from 44.1% in 2005 to 42.8% in 2007. A 1.3% decrease.
  2. The amount of young people having sexual intercourse before the age of 13 decreased from 7.7% in 2005 to 5.6% in 2007. A 2.1% decrease.
  3. The amount of teenagers who have had sexual intercourse with 4 or more partners in their lifetime has decreased from 15.2% in 2005 to 13.1% in 2007. A 2.1% decrease.
  4. The amount of teenagers who had sexual intercourse within 3 months of taking the survey decreased from 30.8% in 2005 to 30.5% in 2007. Only a slight decrease of 0.2% but still a decrease, and definitely not an increase.

Then there was this set of data. I want to include this because I constantly am reading about how abstinence only ed is making teens more ignorant in there choices of protection if they do choose to have sexual intercourse. But just take a look at this data.

  1. The amounts of teens who used a condom the last time they had sexual intercourse increased from 62.4% in 2005 to 69.1% in 2007. A 6.7% increase.
  2. The amount of teens who used the withdrawl method as a form of contraception the last time they had sexual intercourse decreased from 21.6% in 2005 to 19.3% in 2007. A 2.3% decrease.

I hope that you found this to be encouraging. Abstinence education works. And it will continue to work if we are allowed to speak it and teach it to the teens of our area.

One Response to “Abstinence Education: Just Stating the Facts”

  1. ErvinTW Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 11:12 am

    Thanks! Nice post.

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