by Hanne Blank
These are almost exclusively ideological statements. Statements about the harmfulness of sexual activity or even unmarried childbearing are meaningless unless they involve very specific social contexts. Significant rates of unmarried sexual activity have been a constant throughout the twentieth century, yet somehow we continue on the whole not only to survive but to thrive, much of the developed world enjoying standards of living and civil freedoms of which our forebears could only dream. As for the perniciousness of unmarried parenthood, the statistics from many northern European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, as well as Iceland, give the lie to doomsday scenarios. Approximately half of the babies born in Denmark and Sweden are born to unmarried adults, and in Iceland the ratio of births to unwed parents jumps to two-thirds,* yet in none of these countries has this led to social trauma, economic catastrophe, or even a general hue and cry among the clergy of these Protestant nations.
The other planks of the Section 510(b) agenda are similarly reactionary and shaky. The importance of self-sufficiency prior to sexual debut, for instance, is just another version of the economic argument that for millennia has been used to argue for female virginity prior to marriage. Ironically, part of the reason that economic self-sufficiency is indeed an asset for would-be parents in the United States is that there is little provision for public, subsidized health or child care. To state unequivocally that an individual woman's economic self-sufficiency is the primary factor in whether it is difficult for her to raise a child as a single parent is to put the cart well before the horse. Although a "mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage," as promoted by the 510(b) legislation, may enhance the resources available for childrearing, as generations of women have painfully learned, it is hardly a guarantee.
A similarly ideological, historically shortsighted item of Section 510(b) is its emphasis on monogamy and marriage. While it is generally true that females have historically been expected to refrain from sex prior to marriage, it is also true that males have not. This "expected standard" must perforce be a relatively new invention, and one which arguably owes its existence to gender-egalitarian feminist theory. It also bears noting that if this is indeed a standard expected by some minority of the American populace, it has demonstrably never been the standard observed by the vast majority.
Additionally troublesome from a historical and legislative perspective are the words "school-age" and "children." In the United States, public schooling now commonly lasts until age eighteen. But in thirty states, secondary education is only compulsory until a young person reaches the age of sixteen (in another nine states it is seventeen). Therefore, the age at which a young person may be considered school-age can vary considerably, and the end of the school-age period may or may not coincide with the transition to legal adulthood.
This is not the only reason it can be tricky to determine who should be considered an adult and who must be considered a child in America. The federal age of majority is eighteen years of age, but individual state laws make it possible for minors to legally drive cars, hold paying jobs, and in some cases be prosecuted as adults in criminal court.* With parental consent, depending on state law, it may be possible for minors to marry. At age seventeen, and again with parental consent, minors may join the U.S. military. At the same time, young people must be at least eighteen to vote or buy pornography, and twenty-one to buy or consume alcohol. Even if the question of who is a child is based completely on whether a young person has the legal authority to consent to sex, the age at which this is possible varies from state to state and from fifteen years of age to eighteen. While it would be silly to suggest that Americans are incapable of recognizing the difference between children and adults when dealing with individuals, American law often makes it a confusing task to differentiate between them in legislative terms. Section 510(b) is clearly using the most inclusive possible definition of "child," which is to say including all legal minors as children. But by doing so, Section 510(b) contradicts, in spirit, the letter of many extant state laws.
All these things are troubling. More troubling still, from a political perspective, is that American abstinence-only legislation has generated a top-down ideological program that rests neither on the demands of extant law nor upon the wishes of American voters. Surveys repeatedly find that more than 90 percent of Americans support comprehensive sex education in the schools, and that upward of 80 percent of American adults believe that birth control and safer-sex information should be provided even to teenagers who are not yet sexually active. Abstinence education does not reflect an American popular mandate, but rather an unasked-for imposition of a moral agenda. This is unprecedented in American history and unique among the nations of the contemporary developed world.
It is also, in its public refusal to use the actual word "virginity," both canny and strange.. The word "virginity" appears nowhere in American legislation that deals with the ideal of "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard." One might well wonder why. It seems odd that, having described premarital virginity in detail, they would shy away from simply using the term. It is, after all, what they're talking about.
But it does not appear to be what they want to be perceived as talking about. Virginity has, for reasons both valid and not, gotten something of a bad reputation over the course of the twentieth century. In America particularly, a person who is a virgin is often seen as a rarity, perhaps an oddity, probably an unredeemable loser. No wonder AFLA, Section 510(b) programs, and abstinence educators alike seem to prefer to avoid it.
Abstinence, on the other hand, is associated with virtuous self-control. Critically, it offers the impression of choice. One is a virgin, but one chooses to abstain. Using the word "abstinence" in this context suggests the quintessentially American ideals of self-determination and choice. It verbally transforms compliance with government propaganda into a celebration of personal liberty.
Renaming virginity "abstinence" lifts it out of a web of unpleasant associations and makes it modern. Conveniently, it also sidesteps religious implications: Jesus's mother was not Abstinent Mary. Use of the word "abstinence" is also convenient in that it applies not only to those who have never had sex, but also to those who have already had sex but might be convinced not to do it again. Virginity, after all, is seen as perishable, a one-time-only affair. While the idea of "secondary virginity" is popular in some circles, it is also a problematic term for any number of reasons, not least that it appears to be an oxymoron. Abstinence, on the other hand, can be used in reference to anyone, because a person can abstain from something whether he or she has or hasn't tried it to begin with. Given that approximately 50 percent of American young people have participated in partnered sex by the time they leave high school, the utility of all-encompassing terminology is evident.
Many critics of abstinence-only education have claimed that the abstinence-education agenda is transparently religiously motivated. Indeed, there are numerous connections between the abstinence movement, individual Christians, and Christian denominations more generally. Many recipients of AFLA funding in the early 1980s were religious individuals or organizations who used the funding to help finance the development of abstinence curricula and teaching materials based on overtly religious principles. When Section 510(b) made the teaching of abstinence ideology a condition of granting its educational funding to states and community organizations, those curricula and materials stood poised to supply the market that Section 510(b) created.
An often-cited example is the controversial grade seven to nine curriculum Sex Respect. A joint production of Catholic sex educator Coleen Kelly Mast, whose other titles include Love and Life: A Christian Sexual Morality Guide for Teens, and an organization based in Glenview, Illinois, called the Committee on the Status of Women (founded by longtime archconservative Phyllis Schlafly), Sex Respect was funded in part by a $391,000 AFLA grant awarded in 1985. Creation of a similar curriculum intended for a high-school audienc
e, Facing Reality, it was funded by a three-year, $300,000 AFLA grant awarded in 1990. Mast is now considered one of the leading experts on abstinence education. Her résumé includes having been one of four Americans chosen to participate in a 1996 conclave on "Education for Chastity" held by the Vatican. Mast's curricula, which have been lambasted by the press as well as by scientific organizations for their medical inaccuracies and for instances of racial and other bias, are used in over two thousand American public school districts.
Religion collides with federal funding in the production of abstinence-education materials in a very different way in the case of the program called Free Teens USA. A recipient of Section 510(b) funding, Free Teens USA is run by a group of individuals with strong ties to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's controversial Unification Church. In 2003 reporter John Gorenfeld, writing for the online magazine Salon, divulged the results of his spelunking into federal files made accessible through the Freedom of Information Act. Free Teens administrators have headed statewide Unification Church branches, worked for Unification Church—owned companies, including the gun manufacturer Kahr Arms, and worked as senior financial officers within the central Unification Church. The Unification Church claims no official ties to Free Teens, but this is often the case for Moon-affiliated front organizations. It must be said that Free Teens abstinence education conforms quite well with the Unification stance on sexuality, which holds that any sexual experience outside of marriage is an abomination, even to the point that the Reverend Moon has advocated (in 1992) that women who are sexually attacked should kill themselves rather than go through the "fall" of being raped.
Religion also plays a role in abstinence education through the secular adaptation of teaching methods and strategies devised for use in religious contexts. Beginning in the early 1990s, evangelical Christian ministries targeting adolescent and young-adult populations began to form groups and create programs specifically designed to deal with what they view as a cultural onslaught against sexual purity. The best known of these, and one of the oldest, is True Love Waits, run by Life Way Christian Resources, an operation of the Southern Baptist Convention. In addition to producing and licensing a number of products, including sportswear, stickers, and jewelry, True Love Waits also offers a number of counseling, educational, and motivational programs.
True Love Waits' most distinctive offering by far, however, is the True Love Waits Commitment Card. This is a simple piece of paper, with space for a signature at the bottom, that reads: "My Commitment: Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."
True Love Waits' pledge cards have proven popular, a staple of TLW's small community groups as well as massive regional rallies. A similar pledge-taking phenomenon called the Silver Ring Thing puts a fifteen-dollar silver ring on the pledge-taker's left ring finger (the same finger on which Americans traditionally wear their wedding rings) as an outwardly visible sign that one has taken the pledge. Approximately eighty other religious virginity-pledge groups, including the Unification Church's Pure Love Alliance, exist and have modified this pledge process for their own uses. So have numerous abstinence curricula intended for use in public schools. Sex Respect includes a version that reads "I, [the undersigned], promise to abstain from sex until my wedding night. I want to reserve my sexual powers to give life and love for my future spouse and marriage. I will respect my gift of sexuality by keeping my mind and thoughts pure as I prepare for my true love. I commit to grow in character to learn to live in love and freedom." Although this and other secularized versions omit references to God, the Bible, and other explicitly religious concepts, they do exude a sanctimonious odor.
To the young people signing these pledges, however, the language is often less important than whether or not their friends are signing up. Two researchers, Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Hannah Bruckner of Yale, devoted themselves for several years to researching the effects—good, bad, and indifferent—of virginity pledging. Their findings, released in several reports beginning with the landmark 2001 "Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and the Transition to First Intercourse," which was published in The American Journal of Sociology, determined that while virginity pledges did have some effect on the sexual behavior of those who made them, what mattered most was whether signing—and keeping—the pledge was considered "cool."
The more pledgers there were in a particular school, the more likely pledgers were to keep their pledges. But this was only true as long as the number of pledgers did not grow so large that being a virginity pledger stopped being an identifiable subculture. There was, Bearman and Bruckner discovered, a specific point beyond which pledges were no longer likely to have an effect. When more than 30 percent of the students at a given school took abstinence pledges, the pledgers stopped delaying virginity loss. As the researchers put it, "The pledge identity is meaningful, consequently, only if it is a minority identity, a common situation for identity movements."
For those pledgers to whom the "pledge identity is meaningful," on the other hand, it appears that pledging does indeed delay sexual debut. Not, it must be said, for the entire period stipulated in the pledge, but for roughly eighteen months. As Bearman and Bruckner put it, "There comes a phase chronologically where the pledgers catch up with nonpledgers."
While abstinence promoters view this figure as evidence of success, critics have interpreted it as a sign of failure. Other researchers looking at the same data—the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), the only federally run sexuality research to date that has included virginity pledge questions—like Harvard's Janet Rosenbaum, have found similarly high rates of pledge breaking. Rosenbaum's research, published in 2006, indicates that 52 percent of pledgers had sex within a year. More troublesome, Rosenbaum's research suggests that teens are likely to lie about their sexual experience to "reconcile their memories with present beliefs," with 73 percent of those who had sex after pledging later denying that they made the pledge at all. Perhaps such cognitive dissonance is to blame, as Bearman and Bruckner suggest, for pledgers being approximately one-third less likely than non-pledgers to use contraception when they first have sex.
What little research has been done on abstinence-education programs has yielded similarly indifferent evidence of their effectiveness. Neither AFLA nor Title V Section 510(b) requires that the programs they underwrite provide proof of their effectiveness. Some states, though, have taken such evaluations upon themselves. Success, on the whole, has been elusive. Many state reviews, such as those conducted in Arizona (June 2003) and Texas (2004), found that sexual behavior among young people who have been taught "abstinence" curricula have not differed substantially from what they had been when students were taught earlier "comprehensive" curricula. Some reviews, such as the independent study commissioned by the Minnesota Department of Health to study the effect of the state's "Education Now and Babies Later" (ENABL) program from 1998 to 2002, revealed that in some schools, sexual activity among abstinence program participants increased substantially. Where positive effects have been shown to come from abstinence programs, they have been most strongly associated with short-term outcomes (a finding that seems congruent with Bearman and Bruckner's research) and younger students.
What will come of the American experiment in disseminating a federal virginity ideology is uncertain. Since the system and its ideological agenda were instated without public debate or referendum, it is inaccurate to say that the program was one that the American public chose. But because there is no means by which these federal provisions can be repealed by national ballot, they are not likely to be repealed at all unless through a successful Supreme Court challenge of their constitutionality. For purely economic reasons, states are unlikely to forgo the funds offered through Section 510(b), although many individual municipal school distri
cts have either refused to accept Section 510(b) funds or have channeled them to programs outside of the schools.
The abstinence agenda has its vocal critics—California congressman Henry Waxman is a notable example—both inside and outside of the Washington Beltway. But it also has its very vocal champions, not least in the Bush White House. The intensity of executive support for abstinence programs has made itself felt beyond AFLA and Section 510(b), sometimes in disturbing ways.
The Centers for Disease Control, the federal medical research organization responsible for addressing infectious and chronic diseases, had until 2002 been conducting research into "Programs That Work," sex-education curricula that had been proven through empirical review to effectively reduce risky sexual behaviors. Of the five they identified as effective, none were abstinence centered. Since 2002, however, the CDC has discontinued this research program and the program's findings have been removed from public view at the CDC's Web site. Other CDC statements praising contraception in a public-health context have also mysteriously vanished from the CDC's online offerings, leaving, instead, statements of presidential and other official support of abstinence programs. It seems reasonable to surmise that high-ranking opposition to anything other than the official virginity-until-marriage agenda has created something of a chilling effect on the CDC's ability to conduct and present scientific research on reproductive health issues.