By The Journal Times Editorial Board | Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2009 12:00 am
Biology is often stronger than willpower. You don't have to wear a lab coat to know that, but your words carry more weight if you do.
Teenagers follow through less than half the time on pledges to abstain from sex until marriage, according to a study in this month's scientific journal Pediatrics. In fact, more than four out of five denied ever making that promise.
Research will never win the fight against libido or selective memory. It might, however, be able to influence what the nation teaches kids about sex. That's a pretty timely topic, given the $176 million Congress could soon approve for abstinence-centered sex education programs.
The Bush administration has been a huge backer of those programs, and chastity until marriage is still a worthy goal to be promoted. Students who didn't take pledges had premarital sex just as often and just as early as those who did, the study found. But, even though the study specifically focused on students with similar views toward sex, the non-pledging group was 10 percentage points more likely to use birth control.
Proponents of abstinence education counter with other studies that suggest it's working where "comprehensive" teaching fails. The two camps should stop spending so much energy trashing each other's science. This is supposed to be a push toward a common goal, not a boxing match where one side needs to score a clear knockout.
If that goal is to minimize the number of teen pregnancies - and whose isn't? - then a mixed approach is clearly best. Educators can stress that condoms or birth control pills will greatly reduce the chances of becoming pregnant. So can parents, if that meshes with their beliefs.
They can also stress that abstaining is the only foolproof way to prevent it. Really, it's possible to teach both approaches without one undermining the other. They're not mutually exclusive.
"Even parents who approve of premarital sex are still afraid that if they teach their kids to use condoms, it might be misconstrued as encouraging sex," the author of the study, Janet Rosenbaum, told Time magazine. "And there's no basis for that."
If anything, research like hers spotlights the limitations of any public program. Teens can sign any paper they're asked to sign, but until they're confronted with that emotional situation there's no real weight behind that John Hancock. Nor is a demonstration on condom use a guarantee headstrong boys will wear them.
Taken together, though, the approaches are too important to abandon. Despite the can-do attitudes of celebrities like Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears, teen mothers face tough statistical odds. So does the rest of society; American taxpayers' costs of supporting teen parents added up to more than $9 billion in 2004.
To accept a two-pronged approach, of course, national leaders will have to resist a biological urge of their own, which is to throw money around indiscriminately.