WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) - Pregnancy prevention programs that include talking to teens about their sexual behavior and instructing them on contraception use do not increase sexual activity among young people, according to a report released Wednesday.
The report, which reviewed 73 controlled studies of over 250 pregnancy prevention programs from across the country, concluded that programs that stress discussions of sexuality with teens may work best at delaying sexual experimentation and ultimately preventing pregnancy. The report further concludes that abstinence-only programs have not shown promising results.
``The overwhelming weight of evidence clearly shows that sex and HIV education programs...do not increase sexual activity as some people have reasonably feared,'' said Dr. Douglas Kirby, who authored the report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
The report highlighted eight model programs that have successfully lowered teen pregnancy rates. Five of those programs focus primarily on sexual behavior in attempts to convince teens to abstain from sex but to use condoms or other contraception if they decide to have sex.
Two others highlighting community service as a confidence building--and even a distracting--influence on at-risk children also made the list of the best strategies.
The authors deemed an eighth program combining sexual education with tutoring, work counseling, sports activities, contraception services, and other help for teens as most effective. That project, called the Carerra Program, succeeded in cutting the teenage girls' pregnancy rate in half for up to 3 years, Kirby said.
Left off the list were any of the controversial ``abstinence only'' programs that stress avoiding sex until marriage with no talk of safer sex practices for teens. Most of those programs are not large enough or old enough to have been studied properly, though few have shown any ability to delay sexual intercourse in young people or prevent early pregnancies, Kirby said.
``The few early results from abstinence-only programs are not encouraging,'' he said.
Such programs came into public focus after Congress passed the 1996 Welfare Reform Law. That law targeted $85 million per year in federal money to teen pregnancy programs that restricted their message to one of abstinence until marriage. Between $200 million and $300 million in other federal money still goes to programs that discuss sexuality with teens.
Paul Webster, director of education services at the conservative Institute for Youth Development said that abstinence-only programs have not been given the funding or the time necessary to prove their worth.
``A lot of taxpayers have a moral objection to promoting sexually explicit conversations to school children,'' Webster said in an interview with Reuters Health.
Sarah Brown, president of the National Campaign, said that most Americans favor a combined approach and blamed the debate pitting abstinence-only programs against sex education on ``a narrow band of right- and left-wing ideologues.''
Research, Brown said, is useful in deciding what works. But regardless of study outcomes, communities will continue to make their own educational choices based on local values, politics, religion, and economics. The study's most effective program combining sex education with life and work support was by far the most expensive at more than $4,000 annually per teen.
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