Free condom distribution without counseling led to an increase in teen
pregnancy in the 1990s, according to a new study released last week.
The study, conducted by Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman from the
University of Notre Dame, found fertility rates increased by 10 percent
in communities where schools provided free condoms. Gonorrhea rates
rose, as well.
The study, a working paper with National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER), compared teen girls in schools that provided free condoms with
20- to 24-year-olds in the same location and teen girls in schools that
did not provide condoms. Buckles and Hungerman analyzed data from 22
districts in 12 states, a total of 484 schools in mostly large, urban
areas. Most of the condom distribution programs they studied launched in
1992 or 1993 to combat the AIDS epidemic.
“Access to condoms for the entire high-school-aged population in a
county would lead to about five extra births per 1,000 teenage women, or
a 10 percent increase relative to the mean,” wrote Buckles and
Hungerman. “Since the average program covered about one-third of the
teenage women in the county, the typical program led to an additional
two births per 1,000 teenage women.”
The study listed three possible reasons for the increase: encouraging
risky sexual behavior, promoting condom use over methods that better
prevent pregnancy, or diverting school resources away from other
effective programs.
The study noted one caveat: If a school provided a free condom
alongside counseling and instruction, the 10-percent increase weakened
and, in some cases, reversed. Buckles and Hungerman reported two-thirds
of the programs they studied included mandatory counseling. Those
findings are leading commentators to argue the study simply proves that
free condoms with counseling is a great way to reduce teen pregnancy.
But it is not that simple, said Valerie Huber, president and CEO of
Ascend (formerly the National Abstinence Education Association). The
NBER paper found access to condoms and counseling had no effect or
reduced teen pregnancy for large, urban school districts in 1992 and
1993. But Huber argues against contextualizing those conclusions to
schools in 2016.
The study’s authors agreed. “Condom distribution programs in today’s
schools may not have the same effects as those shown here,” they wrote.
“Policy makers should therefore use caution in generalizing our results
to predict the effects of condom distribution programs for today’s
teens.”
Today’s landscape is different, Huber said. Sexual education programs
focus more on pregnancy-avoidance instead of sexually transmitted
disease-avoidance and therefore push oral contraceptives and
intrauterine devices and implants. Teen sex is also increasingly
normalized in culture today. So while Huber said the study was
interesting, “we have to see it as a historic document probably as much
as anything.”
Huber pointed to a study Ascend did with the Barna Group looking at
more recent data showing that students reported feeling pressured to
have sex by sexual-education classes, especially contraceptive
demonstrations, or what Buckles and Hungerman’s study would call
“counseling.” The Ascend and Barna research found about 40 percent of
18- and 19-year-olds reported feeling pressured to have sex by sex-ed
classes, more than the percent who felt pressured by a girlfriend or
boyfriend. So counseling is not a silver bullet.
Huber said more schools today are showing interest in sexual risk
avoidance education programs rather than programs that emphasize
contraception and normalize teen sex: “We can do a whole lot better than
a bowl of condoms and counseling.”
Courtesy: WORLD News Service
No comments:
Post a Comment