Media

For Immediate Release:
January 28, 2005

Contact: Adrienne Verrilli
at: 212-819-9770 x325

More than 200 Organizations Send Letter to Congressional Leaders Urging Review of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs

Groups Seek Hearing to Review Harmful Curricula

New York, NY - The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) along with over 210 organizations from across the county sent a letter to Republican and Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives today calling for Congressional oversight into tax-payer funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The letter is in support of a statement made by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) during a December 5 appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos when he stated that it is the responsibility of the U.S. government to ensure that all federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are fully reviewed. The Senator made this statement during a discussion of the egregious errors and inaccuracies uncovered in these programs in a recent report prepared for Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA).

Signatories to the letter represent local, state, national, and US-based international organizations working on a breadth of issues such as teen pregnancy prevention, sexuality education, human rights, and public health issues including HIV/AIDS and reproductive health. The organizations are calling on Senate and House leadership to "support and call for the initiation of a hearing" to fully review the content of these programs.

"We applaud Senator Frist for his support to fully review unproven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs," said Bill Smith, vice president for public policy at SIECUS. "The report issued by Representative Waxman succinctly demonstrates to the American people that their tax money is being used for programs that promote inaccurate, negative, and potentially harmful messages to our nation's young people," Smith continued.

The report, titled The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs, found that "over 80% of the abstinence-only curricula, used by over two-thirds of Special Programs of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS) grantees in 2003, contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health."

Examples of these false, misleading, or distorted statements include:

"Exposure to sweat and tears [are] risk factors for HIV transmission;"
"[I]n heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31% of the time;"
"Women gauge their happiness and judge their success on their relationships. Men's happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments;"
"A pregnancy occurs one out of every seven times that couples use condoms;" and
Sexually-transmitted Chlamydia may cause heart attacks and strokes.

"It is unacceptable that the federal government continues to dump millions of taxpayer dollars into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that contain false and misleading information, censor critical sexual health information, and contain scientific errors," said Smith. "We hope the leadership in the House and Senate will move quickly and call for hearings to review these curricula and hold the appropriate federal agencies responsible," Smith continued.

Since 1982, the U.S. government has spent over a billion dollars on unproven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Of that billion, $620 million dollars has been spent in just the last seven years and under the leadership of President Bush, there has been a continued expansion of investment in these curricula by allocating nearly $168 million in FY 2005 alone. No abstinence-only-until-marriage program has yet to be proven effective in reducing teen pregnancy or the spread of STDs.

"Our young people deserve better than the extremism of half truths and lies. These programs are outside mainstream American values and are not supported by the vast majority of Americans," Smith said. "Yet, the U.S. Congress continues to appropriate more money and the Bush Administration has made them a centerpiece of its domestic agenda. The American public and our elected representatives need to know that these programs are not harmless and they exist only to further the narrow agenda of an extreme right wing fringe," Smith continued.

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