A responsible teacher would never teach a class that drinking and driving can cause devastating and sometimes fatal accidents without also encouraging students who drink anyway to find a designated driver. When it comes to teaching about sex, however, more and more Pennsylvania schools are doing just that -- failing to teach students about prevention.

		Stacey I. Young is a lawyer and Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Women's Law Project, a nonprofit women's legal advocacy organization with offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia (syoung@ womenslawproject.org).

In classrooms throughout Pennsylvania that teach abstinence-only sex education programs, kids are taught that having sex can cause devastating and sometimes fatal effects: unwanted pregnancy and STDs, including HIV/AIDS. However, they're not taught how to prevent these risks by engaging in safe sex. As a result, the roughly one-half of teens who have sex before the age of 19 may be unprepared to protect themselves against the dangers they're warned about.

Despite President Bush's ostensible goal of cutting spending for public health programs, his budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes an increase of $38 million for abstinence-only programs. The new total of $192.5 million represents an increase of more than half of what was squandered on these programs in 2004. Countless medical experts, including a panel of scientists convened by the National Institute of Health, have called for the elimination of this federal financing.

Pennsylvania alone received almost $6 million in federal funds for abstinence-only programs in 2003, which amounts to hundreds of dollars per student. Thanks to Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, this abstinence-only funding will continue to flow in the coming year with very little oversight.

Scientific studies have long proven that these programs are ineffective at delaying the onset of sexual activity. An analysis of 11 evaluations of state abstinence-only programs conducted by Advocates for Youth revealed that they had no lasting positive impact on behavior. Here in Pennsylvania, a study conducted by Penn State researchers that was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Department of Health reviewed the state's costly abstinence-only initiative from 1998-2002 and found that it was "ineffective in reducing sexual onset." In fact, abstinence-only programs may actually increase participants' health risks. A Columbia University study of abstinence-only-until-marriage virginity "pledge" programs, several of which are federally funded in Pennsylvania, found that students who eventually broke these pledges (88 percent of them did) were significantly less likely to use contraceptives when they engaged in sexual activity than students who did not take the pledge.

Meanwhile, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reviewed 250 studies of comprehensive sex education programs and determined that programs that teach abstinence in conjunction with safe sex techniques actually reduce teenage pregnancy rates and don't increase sexual activity.

We recently learned that federal tax dollars fund abstinence-only programs that not only fail to work, but often contain medically inaccurate and misleading information. In December, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman released a highly publicized report detailing the distortions and scare tactics rampant throughout 11 of the 13 most popular federally-funded abstinence-only programs. False statements about contraception, STDs, abortion and gender were found to be pervasive.

For example, some curricula claim that condoms fail to prevent the spread of STDs, that touching another person's genitals can result in pregnancy, that HIV can be spread through sweat and tears, that a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person," and that women need "financial support" while men need "admiration." The study also revealed that the federal government fails to review or approve the accuracy of the information these programs present, an oversight that even Sen. Bill Frist identified as problematic.

In the face of mounting evidence documenting the ineffectiveness and deception of abstinence-only programs, we must stop kidding ourselves about young people and sex. In light of the pressure and messages young people receive from peers, the popular media and the Internet, the idea that schools can effectively convince young people to abstain from sex is naive and dangerous. Young people need to know not just about the risks of sex, but how to guard against them. As the American Medical Association recently stated, schools should teach only "comprehensive sex education programs that stress the importance of abstinence ... and also teach about contraceptive choices and safer sex."

On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee introduced a bill that would balance federal abstinence-only funding by providing $206 million for medically accurate, comprehensive sex education programs. While this bill signals an encouraging effort within the federal government to offset the dangerous effects of abstinence-only programs, the current composition of Congress and President Bush's position against comprehensive sex education render its passage unlikely.

If opponents of comprehensive sex education continue to win battles in the educational cultural war, the casualties will be Pennsylvania's kids.