Today's hearing was a review of the first year of the sexual abstinence education provisions within the Welfare Reform Law of 1996. The hearing was the culmination of work on abstinence education by Barton's subcommittee and the Subcommittee on Health and Environment. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of American high school students who have had sexual intercourse has fallen 11 percent in the 1990s. Teen pregnancy remains a significant problem, however. Almost 200,000 teens 17 years and younger have children.
Teenage mothers are less likely to complete high school and more likely to be poor.
In its first year in operation under the Department of Health and Human Services, the program largely is on track, its sponsors say, despite some challenges. Susan Sweat, a member of the Abstinence Advisory Council for West Virginia, told CNS that finding matching funds and getting the word out was proving to be an obstacle in her state. If you don't have some money, you won't get the funds. But the major barrier to the committee's message, the participants agreed, were decades of misinformation by self-styled sex experts on the necessity of sex, and an obsession with sex in the culture and major media.