|
The New York Times
New York Just Says No
to Abstinence Funding
By JENNIFER MEDINA,
nytimes.com on the Web, September 22, 2007
New York is rejecting millions of
dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, the state health
commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, announced yesterday. The decision
puts New York in line with at least 10 other states that have decided to forgo
the federal money in recent years.
New York has received roughly $3.5 million a year from the federal government
for abstinence-only education since 1998. The abstinence program was
approved as part of welfare overhauls under the Clinton administration and was
expanded and restructured under President Bush.
In a statement posted on the Health Department’s Web site, Dr. Daines said, “The
Bush administration’s abstinence-only program is an example of a failed national
healthcare policy directive.” He added that the policy was “based on
ideology rather than on sound scientific-based evidence that must be the
cornerstone of good public healthcare policy.”
The state had also spent $2.6 million annually to fund the same programs over
the last decade. That money will now be spent on other existing programs
for sex education, Dr. Daines said in an interview.
Supporters of abstinence-only education said it should remain an option.
“We’ve seen a lot of attacks on this program,” said Leslee Unruh, the president
of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, based in South Dakota. “A lot of
kids that are abstaining are made to feel as if they are from a Victorian age
and they are not with the ‘Sex and the City’ crowd.”
Dr. Daines’s announcement came the same day that the New York Civil Liberties
Union, which opposes abstinence-only education, released a report detailing the
number of such programs in the state. The report stated that roughly half
of the groups teaching abstinence in the state were religious groups and that
the state had done almost nothing to monitor them.
Dr. Daines said that existing state programs include discussion of abstinence.
But he said the state made the decision based on evidence that the
abstinence-only program did little to prevent teen pregnancies. He said he
also objected to the program’s “narrow ideological view, which is not the
direction we want to go in for sexual health.” He said the state should
encourage the teaching of the use of condoms and include discussions of
abstinence.
Congress is expected to take up funding for abstinence-only education at the end
of the month. California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island are
among the states that have rejected such money.
According to the civil liberties union report, New York was second only to Texas
in the amount of money it received for abstinence education. The federal
government also gives roughly $6 million directly to community groups in New
York for such programs, according to the report.
Sex education is not mandated by New York State, which leaves it to individual
districts to adopt their own curriculum.
In July, the Health Department sent letters to nearly 40 community organizations
and hospitals that had received the funding, stating that their contracts would
not be renewed. The letter did not mention why the contracts were being
canceled.
“We think it is a good thing that they are making efforts to close programs that
were misinforming adolescents,” said Galen Sherwin, the director of the
Reproduction Rights Project for the New York Civil Liberties Union, who wrote
the report. “But there is still a long way to go before you get to
comprehensive, medically sound sex education.”
Both Dr. Daines and Ms. Sherwin cited recent studies, including one by the
federal Government Accountability Office, which concluded that abstinence
programs have not proven to be effective and have sometimes taught teens
inaccurate medical information about sexually transmitted diseases and
pregnancy.
Posted Sept. 21, 2007
|
