Sex-ed for dummies
Education: With abstinence-only programs under fire, lawmakers renew push for “comprehensive” programs that don’t comprehend parental values
Lynn Vincent

Warning: Graphic material

Before state Sen. Brad Zaun on April 9 began reading from a proposed sex-education curriculum on the floor of the Iowa senate, he told parents in the gallery that they might want to remove their children from the chamber.

Some did. Then Zaun, a Republican, began reading from Safer Choices, Level 1, the "comprehensive" and "medically accurate" curriculum that Senate Democrats claimed would serve Iowa public-school kids better than abstinence-based sex education: "'Explain that students will now have a chance to work in pairs to practice with condoms,'" Zaun read. ...

[Another excerpt] But Concerned Women for America's Janet Crouse points out that the Mathematica study contradicts the findings of 15 previous evaluations supporting the effectiveness of abstinence education. That may be because of the Mathematica study's design, which included children who received abstinence training from ages 9 to 11; researchers interviewed the kids after one year, then again five years later.

"The targeted children were too young to absorb the abstinence message, and there was no follow-up to the original abstinence message," Crouse said.

Mathematica's own conclusions, scantly reported by the major media, seem to back Crouse: In a section of the group's report titled "Targeting youth at young ages may not be sufficient," researchers wrote that their findings "provide no information on the effects [abstinence] programs might have if they were implemented for high school youth or began at earlier ages, but served youth through high school." the rest