Just Saying No to Abstinence Ed

If you took a drive last spring down the farm-to-market roads that wind through the piney woods of east Texas, you may have admired a lovely crew of teen beauty queens. They all but radiated from the billboard above you, in sparkling tiaras and evening gowns. They were, each one, card-carrying virgins, declaring, "We Are Waiting for Our Prince Charming." A few miles later, another sign informed you that one in four sexually active teens will contract an STD. You could have also glimpsed a highway testimonial from 15-year-old "Ima Waiten."

In this largely rural corner of the state, it's hard not to go through Longview, a town of 78,000 residents, four Dairy Queens and two high schools—and the birthplace of Virginity Rules, which sponsored these roadside praises of teen abstinence and hosted kid-led virginity campaigns. They represented a small slice of the more than $1 billion George W. Bush has bestowed on abstinence education. But even without a looming budget crisis, the next chief executive may not be so dedicated to the cause. Barack Obama supports comprehensive sex ed. And while Sarah Palin said she opposed "explicit sex-ed programs" in 2006, aides now say both Palin and her running mate, John McCain, back federal funding for programs that "promote abstinence as the best option" but also include "information on contraception." For true believers in the wait-for-marriage camp, that's hardly comforting.

They couldn't be losing their president at a worse time. Studies have cast doubt on the programs' effectiveness, and critics have skewered curricula for breaches of accuracy and ethics. The Bristol Palin pregnancy reduced the issue to a late-night TV punch line. (Actually, Wasilla High teaches both abstinence and comprehensive sex ed, according to principal Dwight Probasco.) But after spending a year trying to understand abstinence education as part of a Kaiser Family Foundation media fellowship, I found a surprisingly nuanced—and highly charged—picture. Conservatives seem to want to brand all comprehensive sex education, which includes detailed discussions of contraception, as a conspiracy to encourage teen sex. Liberals just want abstinence education to go away. Both sides profess to care deeply about the country's youth, and I believe them. Sadly, each side seems to operate in its own universe, while our children live in only one.

Although the world has recently preoccupied itself with sex education in Alaska, it is here, in my home state of Texas, where the battle over abstinence is most pitched. This is the ground where then governor Bush first became abstinence education's most powerful champion. The state draws the biggest share of federal abstinence funds by far, and nearly 95 percent of public school districts teach only abstinence, according to research from the Texas Freedom Network. If the policy fails, no state stands to lose more of its infrastructure for sex education.

That lesson has already become reality for the appropriately named Tonya Waite, who helped found Virginity Rules almost a decade ago. In 1999, the East Texas Abstinence Program, which sponsors Virginity Rules, operated out of a cinderblock building employing only Waite, whose ice-blue eyes and Hollywood smile made her a one-time contender for Miss Texas. This year, the operation had grown to a small honeycomb of cubicles boasting an annual budget of almost $1 million—enough to carry its message to 33 area school districts.

No longer. The program learned this month that it would lose its federal funding. The reasons were unclear, but have only heightened Waite's fear that abstinence ed is in jeopardy. Now 25 state health departments reject federal abstinence money, up from 11 in little more than a year. In December, the government reported a rise in teen birth rates for the first time in 15 years; opponents wasted no time in saying that the trajectory changed on abstinence's watch, and that Texas, the abstinence torchbearer, has a more dismal teen-birth record than any other state, with 62 teen births per 1,000 population. (The national rate is 40 per 1,000.)

But spend time among the folks of east Texas, folks you'll find at the stadium on Friday night and the sanctuary on Sunday morning, and you start to understand why groups like Virginity Rules will not go quietly. This isn't really about sex. In the eyes of supporters, teaching abstinence to teenagers amounts to teaching marriage to future adults. Around here, people see marriage (of a man and a woman at least) as a means to protect children and reduce poverty—making teen abstinence nothing less than a blueprint for America's future.