Abstinence education doesn't work: report

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Abstinence-only education programs meant to teach children to avoid sex until marriage failed to control their sexual behavior, according to a U.S. government report.

Teenagers who took part in the programs as elementary and middle school students were just as likely to have sex as those who did not take part in them, the survey found.

The report, ordered by Congress, was not released by the Health and Human Services Department, but by activists and by California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's office. An HHS spokeswoman did not answer a request for a comment.

The report revived the debate on government abstinence-only education programs, which are strongly supported by the administration of President George W. Bush.

"For both the program and control group youth, the reported mean age at first intercourse was identical, 14.9 years," says the report, available on the Internet here

Teens in both groups were just as likely to use condoms or birth control, the report found -- countering the fears of critics of abstinence-only education, who say children ignorant of how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases will simply have more unprotected sex.

For the report, Christopher Trenholm and colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. interviewed more than 2,000 teenagers with an average age of 16 1/2. They lived in rural and urban communities in Florida, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Virginia.

About 1,200 of them had taken part in abstinence-only education programs four to six years before.