Bay Windows - October 14, 2004
Ethan Jacobs, ejacobs@baywindows.com.

Like most other states, Massachusetts receives federal funds each year for abstinence-only education. The funds come from a provision in the 1996 federal welfare reform bill, which provides money for states to teach youth to abstain from all sexual activity until marriage and to warn them that doing otherwise would have "harmful psychological and physical effects." Under federal law, marriage is categorically heterosexual, the result of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Programs funded with federal abstinence-only money cannot teach students about condoms and safer sex as a viable method to prevent getting STDs.

While many states use the federal money to teach abstinence-only health classes in schools, Massachusetts has taken a different approach.

"We played a very strategic game," said Sophie Godley, who left her post as the state Department of Public Health's (DPH) director of adolescent services in February to become director of prevention and education at Aids Action Committee. In her position at DPH she was responsible for overseeing the use of the abstinence-only funds.

Godley said when the state first began receiving the federal funds, public school sex ed classes were already well-funded at the state level. Although the state allows towns and cities to have local control over health curricula, Godley said state funding allowed schools to teach health classes that both stressed the value of abstinence and offered information on safer sex and condoms. In the late 1990s, Godley said, there was little financial incentive to bring in the federal funding, given the restrictions it would impose on talking about safer sex.

Instead DPH has used the funds for a social marketing campaign, consisting of television and radio ads, brochures and posters aimed at youth. The campaign focused on helping youth build self-esteem and encouraging them to wait to have sex, and steered clear of any rhetoric about the negative consequences of sex outside of wedlock, according to Godley.

Godley said about three years ago the Bay State's unconventional use of the funds caught the attention of abstinence-only proponents at the federal level, who accused the state of misusing the funds. She said Leslie Unruh, founder and president of the national advocacy group Abstinence Clearinghouse, and other national abstinence advocates began lobbying state legislators to move the federal money into the classrooms. They found a sympathetic ear, said Godley, in Rep. Peter Larkin, D-Pittsfield, who wrote Section 140 into the supplemental budget. The provision forbids the state from using federal abstinence funds "for advertising or media purchases."

Neither Unruh nor Larkin returned phone calls to comment for this story.

According to Erin Rowland, a spokesperson for the Planned Parenthood League of New England, which advocates for comprehensive sex ed, Larkin added a similar provision to the regular 2004 budget. That provision was eventually taken out during negotiations between the House and Senate. Larkin told the Associated Press that when the Ways and Means committee drew up the supplemental budget he added in Section 140. Planned Parenthood and other advocates of comprehensive sex ed did not discover the change until it had been signed into law.

"We thought it was dead for the year... and lo and behold, it was in the supplemental budget," said Rowland.

Larkin's provision could force DPH to divert the federal funding to schools, and Rowland said that could have a disastrous effect on the state's efforts to teach youth about safer-sex. As a result of the state budget crisis Rowland said the once-plentiful state funds for sex ed have dried up. She said 2003 marked the first year that federal funding for abstinence-only programs exceeded state funding for comprehensive sex ed, and impoverished school districts may be tempted to take the money.

There are a number of strings attached, said Rowland, if schools use the federal funds to teach sex-ed classes. Programs receiving federal funds must discourage condom use, warning students that they are not effective for preventing STDs, for instance.

She also said the focus on waiting until marriage makes it impossible for federally funded courses to address the needs of GLBT youth. Advocates are unclear how federally funded abstinence-only curricula would address same-sex marriage, which has been legal in Massachusetts since May 17 but remains unrecognized by federal law.

"It's abstinence only until marriage, heterosexual marriage, so what does that say to kids who don't see themselves in a heterosexual marriage, or whose parents aren't in a heterosexual marriage?" said Rowland.

And there is evidence that many of the proponents of abstinence-only education are opposed to recognizing same-sex marriage. Larkin voted in March to approve a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He was among a dozen legislators who filed suit in April to overturn the Supreme Judicial Court's Goodridge decision. The suit was eventually dismissed.

While Abstinence Clearinghouse has issued no explicit condemnation of same-sex marriage, the organization's Web site features a number of editorials by outside writers in favor of a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and there are no editorials that take the opposing view.

Section 140 garnered the support of other major same-sex marriage opponents. When the supplemental budget bill landed on Romney's desk, the Mass. Family Institute and the national Focus on the Family, religious conservative organizations that have worked to prevent same-sex marriage, asked their members to lobby the governor and ask him not to veto Section 140.

Godley called many of the national abstinence-only advocates "extreme Christian right, anti-gay, and anti-abortion," and she said their stance against GLBT rights is mirrored in the federal guidelines for using the abstinence-only funding.

"The point of that federal funding is to promote heterosexual marriage as the only choice and the only alternative for young people," said Godley.

Rowland said that Planned Parenthood's primary objection to the abstinence-only programs is that they do not work. She said a 2001 Columbia University study shows that while students who take abstinence-until-marriage pledges delay their first sexual experience by over a year, once they begin having sex they are less likely to use condoms, increasing their risk for catching STDs or getting pregnant.

Given the rising rate of HIV infection among youth in the Bay State, Godley said a policy that forces school health ed classes to discourage condom use will have long-term effects on youth HIV infection rates.

"We're not going to see the trends next year, but we will see them in a few years," said Godley.

Advocates say it is unclear when DPH will begin operating under the new guidelines set forth in the supplemental budget. Representatives from DPH did not return Bay Windows' calls before press time.

In the meantime advocates are working to overturn Section 140.

"There may be another supplemental budget going on," said Rowland, who said Planned Parenthood and other sex ed advocates hope to include a provision overturning Section 140. "If that doesn't happen then our next opportunity would be when they do the budget for '06."

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