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Governor cuts funds for abstinence education

By Eric Adcock
Special to The Catholic Virginian

Governor Timothy Kaine has eliminated the $275,000 that Virginia previously provided in matching funds for federally supported abstinence education offered in some of its public schools.

According to an article in the November 12th Washington Post, Planned Parenthood of Virginia lobbied the Governor to make the policy change. The organization also sent out an alert praising the Governor’s decision and criticizing two Catholic legislators who have said they will work to restore this funding.

In addition to calling Senator Ken Cuccinelli and Delegate Robert Marshall “extremists,” Planned Parenthood urged people to send letters to Governor Kaine to thank him for his decision. A sample letter provided by Planned Parenthood says, “In the last decade more than $1 billion has been wasted on dangerous abstinence-only programs that deny teenagers life-saving information.”

While taking aim at uncompromised abstinence education, the Governor’s decision leaves funding intact for contraceptive-based sex education. In doing so, the Washington Post article indicates that Governor Kaine’s office relied on a study released in April by Mathematica Policy Research indicating four abstinence-education programs were not effective in delaying the onset of sexual activity.

Several commentators have identified flaws in the Mathematica methodology, however. These include the small number of federally funded abstinence programs evaluated (only four out of 900, or less than 1 percent), and the lack of a high-school component to those programs (participating students were only nine to 11 years old).

In a letter written earlier this year to members of a U.S. Congressional committee, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB’s) Committee for Pro-Life Activities, emphasized the importance of uncompromised abstinence education, noting that “authentic abstinence education has provided a valuable alternative to programs that accept and facilitate premarital sexual activity,” and that programs that teach “safe sex” are “more accurately described as compromised education: the abstinence message is mentioned, but then undermined with the false message that premature sexual experimentation does no real harm if steps are taken to avoid pregnancy.”

The Virginia Catholic Conference has issued an alert on the Governor’s budget cut. Available on the Internet, the alert allows interested community members to contact the Governor in support of restoring this critical abstinence-education funding.

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