During its reign the Little Bush Idiocracy has authorized spending over a billion US dollars on an international program of moral oppression called 'abstinence only'. The American Medical Association recently noted tbe total failure and waste.
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JAMA 2008;299:2013–2015. [PubMed]..
Since 1996, the US federal government has been pouring money into abstinence-only programs to shape adolescent behavior. The $1.5 billion spent thus far has been stupefyingly ineffective in reducing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unplanned pregnancies.
The programs are required to teach adolescents that abstinence is the only certain way to avoid STIs or unwanted pregnancies, and that sex only within marriage is the expected standard. Safe sex and contraception are not part of the instruction, and funds are not made available for this purpose. President Bush’s budget for 2009 has cut money for global human immunodeficiency virus and STI prevention efforts and allocated $200 million for abstinence-only programs.
Abstinence-only programs do not work. There is no evidence that they prevent what they are intended to prevent. Three reports by a nonpartisan company authorized by Congress have concluded that, compared with controls, the program “had absolutely no measurable impact on initiation rates, ages of first intercourse or number of partners, no impact on pregnancies, births or STDs and the same rates of condom and birth control use.” The teenagers exposed to abstinence-only programs had less certain ideas about condoms preventing infections than controls, leaving critics to reflect that the programs have more to do with spreading conservative ideology than with public health. Hampton notes that the United States has by far the highest teenage pregnancy rates of any developed country, whereas the Netherlands, where a liberal, enlightened attitude prevails, has the lowest.