While the Obama administration has decided to prohibit teaching abstinence from marriage preparation programs for young people, a congressional bipartisan group wants that to change.
The Department of Health and Human Services recently authorized new grants for its Healthy Marriage Initiative and for "education in high schools on the value of marriage, relationship skills and budgeting." But one of the "unallowable activities" is teaching abstinence.
"In my knowledge, I have never seen anything like this inserted in a funding announcement, where a specific program that has a clear connection to the benefits of that program is prohibited," says Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA). "So if we're talking about helping young people have the skills to develop healthy marriages later, abstinence education absolutely needs to be a part of that."
She notes a body of research that links teen sex to future divorce.
"It's really sad when the political and ideological leanings of an administration trump science, health and what's in the best interest of young people," Huber laments. "And this is what we're seeing; this is just the latest example."
She deems it troubling to prevent youth from receiving sexual abstinence education, so her group is calling for a change to the current policy so that funding for abstinence education will be included. House members have already written and signed a letter that outlines their request.
"This letter is calling for a policy change that there once again be some federal priority given to the risk avoidance abstinence message," Huber reports. "And 40 members from both sides of the aisle in the House signed this letter and sent it to the Appropriations Committee, asking the chair to make a change this year in the 2012 Appropriations Bill."
This follows last year's decision from President Obama and Congress, when all funds for abstinence education were zeroed out.
"In the entire history of federal funding for sex education, we have never seen this degree of disparity between abstinence education funding and contraceptive sex-ed funding," Huber notes.
The NAEA executive director fully supports Congress in cutting spending, and she assures that she is not advocating for an increase in funding. "What we're asking is that within that programmatic pot for sex education, there needs to be at least 50 percent of what remains in that pot, after all the debate is over, for a specific risk avoidance abstinence education program."
Huber is more interested in the policy priority than the money figure.
Contact: Bill Bumpas
Source: OneNewsNow