Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the U.S
Open accessAbstract
The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. This trend remains significant after accounting for socioeconomic status, teen educational attainment, ethnic composition of the teen population, and availability of Medicaid waivers for family planning services in each state. These data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S. In alignment with the new evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative and the Precaution Adoption Process Model advocated by the National Institutes of Health, we propose the integration of comprehensive sex and STD education into the biology curriculum in middle and high school science classes and a parallel social studies curriculum that addresses risk-aversion behaviors and planning for the future.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Puritanical sexual attitudes in the USA, coupled with abstinence-only sex education policies, lead to higher teen pregnancy rates and increased transmission of STIs among American religious youths.
“It has been argued that Puritanical sexual attitudes in the USA, coupled with abstinence-only sex education policies, lead to such “backfiring” ills as higher teen pregnancy rates and increased transmission of STIs among American religious youths (Stanger-Hall and Hall 2011).”
From Natural Selection, Childrearing, and the Ethics of Marriage (and Divorce): Building a Case for the Neuroenhancement of Human Relationships (2012) · cites this paper as Stanger-Hall and Hall 2011
The Abstract and Discussion report that stronger abstinence-only policies correlate with higher state-level teen pregnancy rates. The Discussion also reports studies associating comprehensive education with lower HIV/STD risk than strict abstinence-only education. The paper does not establish the claimed combined causal effect of Puritanical attitudes and those policies, or report pregnancy and STI outcomes specifically among religious youths. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 29 · Cited by 402
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- [42]Advocates for Youth 2009 Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.— Why the Difference? 3rd edition: Sue Alford and Debra Hauser. Available: www.advocatesforyouth.org/storage/advfy/documents/fsest.pdf. Accessed 2011, Jan 30
- [43]Bundeszentrale fuer gesundheitliche Aufklaerung (BZgA) 2006 BZgA/WHO Conference on Youth Sex Education in a Multicultural Europe, Cologne, Germany, 2006. Available: http://www.sexualaufklaerung.de/index.php?docid=1111. Accessed 2010, Jun 10
- [44]Bundeszentrale fuer gesundheitliche Aufklaerung (BZgA) 2006 Country papers on youth sex education in Europe. BZgA/WHO Conference, Cologne, Germany, 2006. Available: http://www.sexualaufklaerung.de/index.php?docid=1039. Accessed 2010, Jun 10
- Authors
- Stanger-Hall, K. F., & Hall, D. W.
- Affiliations
- University of Georgia (US)
- ORCID
- Hall, David W.
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2011-10-14
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- e24658
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3194801
- OpenAlex
- W1972972888
- Cited by
- 402
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 56 · 2020: 55 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 26 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 28 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 24.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- University of Georgia
- University of Georgia Research Foundation
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Reproductive Health and Contraception
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
- Keywords
- abstinence-only education, adolescent pregnancy, comprehensive sexuality education, sexually transmitted infections, teen birth rates, Precaution Adoption Process Model, family planning access, Medicaid waivers
- MeSH terms
- Abortion, Induced, Adolescent, Birth Rate, Female, Humans, Legislation as Topic, Medicaid, Models, Biological, Pregnancy, Pregnancy in Adolescence, Sex Education, Sexual Abstinence, Socioeconomic Factors, United States, Cultural Diversity, Young Adult
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
