Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

August 2006 – Though the federal government spends millions of dollars promoting abstinence to America’s youth, it appears that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) failed to get the memo.

That is the conclusion of Focus on the Family sexual health analyst Linda Klepacki, who attended the 2006 National STD Prevention Conference, sponsored by the CDC in May. With the laudable goal of preventing sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), the conference was attended by more than 1,300 public health professionals and academics. 

Klepacki, however, was shocked at the ideological tone permeating what was supposed to be a conference based on scientific fact. “It was blindingly clear that the majority of the attendees wished Christian conservatives would go away and let them tell our young people how to have sex at any age, at any time, with anyone,” she said.

As the dates for the CDC conference approached, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), a supporter of abstinence education, noticed that the conference appeared to promote a lopsided view of the entire issue. The conference’s symposium on the subject was titled, “Are Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs a Threat to Public Health?” There wasn’t a single speaker scheduled who favored either abstinence-only education or the federal support of such programs.

According to online magazine Slate’s Amanda Schaffer, Souder proceeded to contact an official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and demanded more ideological balance at the symposium. Apparently, the CDC acquiesced, adding two pro-abstinence speakers: Dr. Eric Walsh, an instructor at the Family Medicine School of Medicine at Loma Linda University, and Dr. Patricia Sulak, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Texas A&M University’s College of Medicine, and founder of the abstinence program Worth the Wait.

Souder’s attempt to add balance apparently failed, according to Klepacki’s account of the conference in an article in CitizenLink. Despite the views of the two token abstinence proponents, the entire approach of the conference was a haughty, sneering indictment of traditional beliefs about sex and marriage. For example, Klepacki said:

• Dr. Bruce Trigg of the New Mexico Department of Public Health said the government should not be about the business of promoting marriage, which, he said to cheers, is a homophobic institution anyway.
• Dr. John Santelli of Columbia University told the gathered conference attendees that when it came to the subjects of sex and marriage, “You know a whole lot more than parents.”
• Dr. King Holmes of the University of Washington, the last plenary speaker, told the conference that he hoped that one day “a gigantic condom would cover the Washington Monument.”

Santelli recently made waves with two articles he wrote for the Journal of Adolescent Health. In them he dismissed abstinence programs as failures and “morally problematic” because they deny adolescents the “fundamental human rights” to a full explanation of contraceptives and access to condoms, with or without parental approval. Santelli said federal funding of abstinence programs in schools should be repealed.

His charges were answered by a paper issued by the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (www.medinstitute.org) titled “The Attack on Abstinence Education: Fact or Fallacy?” That report analyzed Santelli’s criticisms of abstinence programs and “found a significant number of serious ommissions, misrepresentations, deviations from accepted practices, and opinions presented as facts.”

With such a biased approach so prevalent at the conference, how did attendees respond when Sulak spoke? At one point during a question-and-answer session, Sulak said, “I think we can all agree, even from a purely medical standpoint, that high schoolers ought not to be having sex.”

Klepacki said, “She was shouted down with a boisterous and unified ‘No!’” 

“It’s clear that tolerance and inclusion extends only so far in the world of public health,” Klepacki noted. “There is no tolerance of conservatives, especially if they are religious. We were clearly an un-tolerated minority [at the conference] that was mocked, booed and smeared.”

That an anti-famly ideology should have taken root so deeply at the CDC and among the medical professionals who are working to halt the epidemic of STDs among the nation’s youth is distressing.

Klepacki said the response to Sulak’s view was “just a further demonstration of the political and social push for our children to be sexually active.”  

Do abstinence programs work?
A growing body of research suggests abstinence programs are successful.

For example, a report issued by The Heritage Center for Data Analysis, a division of The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org), found that teens who made virginity pledges through abstinence programs benefited in a host of ways. Such youth were less likely to: 

• Experience teen pregnancy 
• Be sexually active while in high school and as young adults 
• Give birth as teens or young adults
• Give birth out of wedlock 
• Engage in risky unprotected sex