Get ready to hear about this story as irrefutable evidence that abstinence-only sex education "works".
Indeed, the writeup in the Boston Globe certainly appears to lean that way:
Earlier this month, shockwaves rattled partisans of the long-flaring feud that has ensnarled sex education in the United States. A study by University of Pennsylvania researchers offered perhaps the most convincing evidence ever that young adolescents might actually heed messages to delay their first sexual encounters - especially if those messages aren’t preachy.
First, the facts: the study, the veracity of which I have no particular reason to doubt, showed that young kids (average age 12, all African-American because the authors said that group usually has sex earlier than most) exposed only to abstinence education had sex less often in the 2 years following their classes as kids whose education also included proper condom use and so forth. The important comparison is below:
Students who said they started having sex in the two years after completing:
8 hours of abstinence-only classes: 32.6 percent
8 hours of comprehensive sex-education classes, including lessons on abstinence and condom use: 41.2 percent
So, that's an interesting result, but it leaves out something incredibly important, in my view: those 32.6 percent went ahead and had sex with NO EDUCATION on proper condom use. OK, so their abstinence-only education wasn't "preachy". Fabulous. But many of them have NO IDEA how to use a condom properly, or whether they should bother to do so at all. Isn't that kind of crucial? I would definitely take the 41.2 percent if at least they knew what the hell they were doing in some capacity.
If it were all about preventing as many people from having sex as possible, we could claim a sort of victory with this study. But that's not the point. Not at all. In the end, this is about preventing as many unwanted pregnancies as possible, especially among teens. What would complete this study is if we asked how many of those kids went on to have or cause pregnancies before age 18. Why do I get the feeling the "abstinence-only" kids didn't do so hot in that category?
This needs to be approached pragmatically. If you're James Dobson or Pat Robertson, you don't want kids to know about safe sex, but you also don't want to give them a way out when they screw up – because they didn't know about safe sex. What I'm saying is teach kids about the dangers, absolutely, but then give them the ammunition to protect themselves.