PARSE

President Obama submitted his budget for the 2012 Fiscal Year on February 14, 2011. Under increased pressure to reduce discretionary spending in order to reduce the deficit, the President’s budget freezes funding for many important health-related programs, but manages to preserve the core of many initiatives designed to increase access to sexual and reproductive health information and services. The budget reveals the President’s continued commitment to make progress on reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and to expand access to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment activities, supporting the goals of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy. Click here for details.

Obama administration has started a $110 million campaign which will support a range of programs, including those that teach about the risks of specific sexual activities and the benefits of contraception and others that focus primarily on encouraging teens to delay sex.  Click Here to read more.

A bill to repeal all abstinence funding from the federal government was introduced on September 29, 2010 by Sen. Senator Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Lee (D-CA). Click Here to for more information.

 The list of grantees awarded Tier 1 and Tier 2 Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative and Personal Responsibility Education Program Funds by State: Click Here to read the report.

Dr. John B. Jemmott III, the University of Pennsylvania professor, who led a study of middle-school students that found for the first time that abstinence-only education helped to delay their sexual initiation is already beginning to shake up the longstanding debate over how best to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.  The study lead to the program titled Promoting Health Among Teens. Efficacy of abstince only intervention journal article.

Almost all U.S. teens have had formal sex education, but only about two-thirds have been taught about birth control methods, according to a new government report released Wednesday. Many teens apparently are not absorbing those lessons — other recent data shows that after years of steady decline, the teen birth rate rose from 2005 to 2007. It dipped again in 2008, to about 10% of all births. Click Here to view the rest of the article.

Read a wonderful op-ed that appeared in today’s edition of the Daily News in response to the Guttmacher Report and in support of comprehensive sex education and the Notice Home and Healthy youth Acts…

“…Preventing teen pregnancy is a complicated business. American teenagers grow up in a sex-saturated popular culture that at the same time discourages open discussion of sexuality. In other parts of the developed world, teenagers are no less likely to be sexually active, but are much less likely to get pregnant or contract sexually transmitted diseases. The difference: information.”

A report from the Guttmacher Institute shows that the  increase in teen pregnancy rates are “based on trends in teens’ contraceptive use.”

“The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence—and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception—became increasingly widespread and teens’ use of contraceptives declined.” continue reading

Sex-education programs that encourage teens to delay sexual activity and teach them about contraception cut risky sexual behavior, increase condom use and lower the chances of getting the AIDS virus and other infections, a panel of independent experts concluded in a report released Friday.

A CDC panel of experts also found there is “insufficient evidence to know whether programs that focus on encouraging teens to remain sexually abstinent until marriage are effective…”  Continue reading this article.