The Purity Myth (17 page)

* For this reason alone, I tried my darnedest to gain admission to the 2008 conference. Alas, security was tight, and they weren’t letting in any known anti–abstinence education writers.

†
It was widely referred to as the Chastity Act, just in case there was any question about its

purpose.

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prevention programs, but only those that offered abstinence as the only appropriate course of action—no money was to be given to programs that “encouraged” abortion.
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Because the AFL’s programs often advocated specific religious values, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in 1983, claiming that the pro- grams violated the separation of church and state. After a decade-long court battle, a 1993 settlement forbade AFL-funded programs to include religious references and required the information they dispensed to be medically ac- curate, among other stipulations.

The virginity movement’s next win happened in 1996, when a provision attached to the welfare-reform act allotted $50 million a year for five years for abstinence-only programs. (The states that choose to accept those funds are required to match every four federal dollars with three state dollars.)
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The programs that use these funds must follow an eight-point definition (often called the A-H guidelines) of what appropriate abstinence education is. The requirements include program participants’ teaching students that “sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects,” and that “bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society.”
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In addition to its endorsement by the AFL and its funds earmarked through welfare reform,
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abstinence-only education receives funding from the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE), created in 2001 by conservatives in the House of Representatives. CBAE is controlled by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families and is the strict- est—and perhaps most damaging—form of abstinence funding: Under it, grants often go to private, faith-based organizations like crisis pregnancy cen- ters. Grantees
must
teach all eight points of the abstinence A-H guidelines,

must
target children ages twelve to eighteen, and absolutely cannot provide students with any positive information about contraception. Naturally, the virginity movement is a big fan of CBAE subsidies; since the program’s incep- tion in 2001, funding has increased by 465 percent and reached a whopping

$113 million in 2007.
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t h e P l a y e r s

So who are these elusive leaders of the virginity movement? The major players are the Abstinence Clearinghouse and the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA). They’re the leading lobbyists, organizations, and pro- viders of “educational” material in the United States. And while proponents of abstinence education run the gamut from legislators to community lead- ers, it’s large organizations like these, and their powerful ties to conservative Christian think tanks (and more), that make them so very influential.

The National Advisory Council for the Abstinence Clearinghouse, for ex- ample, includes members from Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation, and numerous crisis pregnancy centers. The organization, which receives more than half a million dollars a year in government grants and contracts, also has a strictly anti-choice medical abstinence board, which must “not only support abstinence-only-until-marriage programs” but also not “counsel, prescribe, or distribute condoms or contraceptives to youth.”
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(In addition to its connection to the abstinence movement, the organization has ties to campaigns that aim to limit access to the HPV vaccine and contraception.)

Perhaps the most important aspect about the Clearinghouse is that Leslee Unruh, arguably the most well-known leader of the abstinence and anti-choice movements, heads it. Unruh, who gained national attention in 2006 when she was campaigning in South Dakota for a ban on abortion (even

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in cases of rape and incest), frequently makes the rounds on radio and cable television, touting abstinence-only education and deriding abortion, birth control, and premarital sex. Her debating style is quite . . . original. A 2007 Fox News segment featured Unruh and Mary Alice Carr, of NARAL Pro- Choice New York, debating over a new oral contraceptive called Lybrel. After arguing that the birth control pill was poison and that women needed to be protected from it, Unruh ended the segment by shouting over Carr, “I want more babies. More babies! We love babies!”
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Unruh loves babies so much, in fact, that she founded an organization called the Alpha Center, which aims to convince women not to have abor- tions. In 1987, the Alpha Center pled no contest to five misdemeanor charges of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices. (Nineteen charges, includ- ing four felonies, were dropped.) Tim Wilka, the state’s attorney in Minneha- ha County, South Dakota, at the time, told the
Argus Leader,
“There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made [against Unruh] and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children. . . . Gov. George Mickelson called me and asked me to take the case.”
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Apparently, Unruh had been promising pregnant teens money to stay pregnant so she could later put their children up for adoption.

The NAEA doesn’t have a much better record. In 2007, the organization, whose board comprises a virtual who’s who of abstinence education, hired the public relations firm Creative Response Concepts—known for the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans ads slamming John Kerry—to spearhead a PR campaign for abstinence-only education policies. In 2006, NAEA executive director Valerie Huber, the head of Ohio’s abstinence programs, was suspended after a state ethics investigation found her guilty of neglect of duty for hiring a com- pany she was affiliated with to do state work.
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Another abstinence organization, Heritage Community Services (which runs after-school abstinence programs and training workshops for teachers and sells abstinence-only curricula), receives a staggering $3 million a year in government contributions and grants. Like the Clearing- house and the NAEA, Heritage’s leadership is wrought with ethical red f lags. The women’s legal-rights organization Legal Momentum* reports that the Heritage curriculum is produced and sold by Badgley Enterpris- es, a for-profit company run by Heritage founder and CEO Anne Badgley and her husband.

Heritage Community Services purchases its Heritage Keepers textbooks from Badgley Enterprises. Public records show that Badgley Enterprises

earned $174,201 from the sale of its textbooks to Heritage in 2004, and that Badgley herself earned $51,000 as a writer for Badgley Enterprises. Addi- tionally, Badgley’s husband, daughter, and son-in-law are all paid Heritage employees. Accusations have also been made that Badgley Enterprises was used as a personal account for various members of the Badgley family.
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In addition, it came out that the organization had paid $11,000 in 2002 to send two South Carolina state employees to an abstinence conference in Cali- fornia. Badgley defended the decision by calling the trip “inexpensive.”
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These organizations and leaders have strong ties to the anti-choice movement and conservative Christian groups. They have no place in public schools, yet the power they wield over American youth, even in our public schools, is a little more than unnerving.

* Where I had my first job out of grad school (in the interest of full disclosure).

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b a t t l i n g b a c K

This abstinence-only world is a far cry from reality (residing somewhere in Oz, perhaps?), and not even close to what people want for themselves and their children. According to a study published in
Pediatrics & Adolescent Med- icine,
82 percent of Americans support programs that teach contraception as well as abstinence, and half of all Americans oppose abstinence-only educa- tion altogether. Even among those who describe themselves as conservatives, 70 percent support comprehensive sex education.
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Some parents—those who aren’t about to sit back and watch their kids get taught that condoms don’t work and sex is dirty—
are
fighting back. The wonderful documentary
Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque
fol- lows the story of a New Mexico mom, Susan Rodriguez, who was outraged when she found out that a faith-based private organization—funded by federal dollars—was teaching her daughter about sex.*
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Rodriguez went to the Albuquerque school board in 2005 and started complaining, and more and more people in the community took notice. Community mem- bers, local politicians, and lawmakers made enough of a fuss that, after a yearlong fight, the state stopped funding these programs in middle and high schools.

One mother, Kristin Phillips, told me in an email that her daughter came home complaining about an STD assembly she was required to attend when she was a sophomore at a Missouri high school.

“The woman leading the assembly told them calculated untruths and

* Another thing that really struck me while watching this film was how an organiza- tion composed of mostly white, Christian women was deciding what young women of color—many of them poor—would learn about appropriate sexual behavior and what constitutes a family. Many children in New Mexico come from single-parent homes (bad!); some of them may have parents who aren’t straight (sin!).

misleading statements about how condoms have very high failure rates, and [said] there was no reason to get the HPV vaccine,” Phillips wrote.

Phillips discovered the program violated state law, which required sex ed teachers to provide medically accurate information and contraceptive op- tions, and that parents be notified about and informed of the content of any sex ed programs their children would be attending.

“I was directed to the school nurse who was in charge of setting up this program every year,” Phillips continued. “I told her I was concerned about the things the students had been told, and that I had a problem with [their] being given false information about contraception and the HPV vaccine. I pointed out that the district was in violation of the state law, but she said that was ‘my interpretation.’”

Rodriguez and Phillips are not the only parents fighting back—thank goodness. The Internet—teens’ public forum of choice—makes calling out misinformation easier, especially for young people. One student, wary of an abstinence lecture at his high school in Spencer, Iowa, filmed the presentation with his cell phone and posted it on YouTube. In addition to telling run-of- the-mill lies about contraception and STIs to the adolescent audience, the lecturer claimed, “The base of most of the lipstick sold in our stores comes from aborted babies.”*
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The video made the rounds on political blogs, expos- ing abstinence programs’ outrageousness even further.

On Facebook, users have created over 150 groups dedicated to shining a light on how dangerous and illogical abstinence-only education is, including popular groups like Abolish Abstinence-Only Education—which has nearly one hundred thousand members and posts action items, news alerts, and