Federally funded sex education programs linked to decline in teen birth rates, new study shows

The implementation of federally funded intercourse teaching programs over a decade in the past was adopted by a decline in teenage pregnancies in counties the place these packages had been applied, finds a brand new research. The analysis, which encompasses a 20-year interval, provides a long-term evaluation of the influence of complete intercourse training in decreasing teen start charges.

“Intercourse training in the US has been hotly debated amongst researchers, coverage makers, and the general public,” says Nicholas Mark, a doctoral candidate in New York College’s Division of Sociology and the lead creator of the paper, which seems within the Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our evaluation offers proof that funding for extra complete intercourse training led to an general discount within the teen start fee on the county stage of greater than 3 %.”

“We have recognized for a while that abstinence-only packages are ineffective at decreasing teen start charges,” provides Lawrence Wu, a professor in NYU’s Division of Sociology and the paper’s senior creator. “This work exhibits that extra wide-reaching intercourse teaching programs—these not restricted to abstinence—are profitable in decreasing charges of teenage being pregnant.”

To review the influence of intercourse teaching programs, the researchers targeted on the federal Teen Being pregnant Prevention program (TPP), which was initiated in 2010 and awards funding on the county stage. The overwhelming majority of those packages present extra complete info on intercourse, contraception, and reproductive well being than do abstinence-only packages. Native organizations receiving TPP funding for his or her packages focused completely different teams of at-risk youth. For instance, one delivered in San Diego centered on ninth and tenth grade college students in faculties recognized as “teen being pregnant hotspots.”

Whereas earlier research have concluded that broadly primarily based intercourse teaching programs are helpful in decreasing teenage being pregnant charges, many depend on correlational assist. The PNAS analysis, against this, examined which counties obtained TPP funding and subsequent start charges, which Mark and Wu studied by analyzing start certificates, thereby capturing the mom’s age and county of residence. Encompassing the timing of program implementation and later start charges allowed the researchers to conduct a “quasi experiment”—one that would doubtlessly illuminate a cause-and-effect relationship, however with no random pattern that’s typical of conventional experimental analysis.

Extra particularly, they checked out teenage start charges in 55 U.S. counties within the years main as much as their receiving TPP funding (1996-2009) and in the course of the years they did obtain this assist (2010-2016). They then in contrast teen start charges within the 55 funded counties to teen start charges in additional than 2,800 unfunded counties within the years earlier than and after TPP funding.

General in these counties, teenage being pregnant charges dropped by 1.5 % within the first yr of TPP funding, however fell by roughly 7 % within the fifth yr of funding for a median discount of over 3 % in the course of the studied interval.

Mark and Wu notice {that a} small decline in teenage start charges shortly after the introduction of intercourse teaching programs is in line with previous analysis, including that, over time, these charges decline additional—maybe because of better numbers of teenagers receiving the programming and coinciding with years through which they grew to become extra sexually energetic.

Extra considerably, they conclude, the work captures the timing and receipt of federal funding for complete intercourse training in assessing its influence on teenage being pregnant.