Abstinence debate, meet scientific method

I won't claim to have read every study of abstinence education, but to my knowledge it's never been shown to reduce sex-related problems like STDs and pregnancy.

Still, people need to cut it out with the garbage arguments. The teen birth rate rose in 2006, and The New York Times takes seriously the question of whether abstinence-teaching caused it. Lawyers, Guns and Money thinks so. Matthew Yglesias piles on.

Let's take a closer look. Federal funding has been rising, sometimes slowly and sometimes by leaps and bounds, since at least 1997. 2006 marks the first time since 1991 that the birth rate rose -- in other words, it's the first year in at least a decade that the raw data has run counter to the "abstinence ed decreases the birth rate" thesis.

Experiments (taking three comparable groups and putting one through abstinence education, another through regular sex ed and the last through no program) and regression analyses (looking at what education kids are getting and whether they get pregnant, and controlling for variables like income, race, etc.) are far better ways to answer this question, so of course this doesn't prove abstinence education works. But the left needs to stop overreacting whenever data even slightly supports its ideas.

And as an aside, the increase is small; judging by the graph, the birthrate is about as high as it was in 2002-3 or so. In addition, blacks seemed to demonstrate the most dramatic 2006 spike, and they experienced an equally dramatic 2005 valley -- once a given statistic gets very high or very low, it's hard to drive it further in that direction, so a minor setback shouldn't be taken as evidence of failure. Finally, in some small part Hispanic population growth is causing this, as they have double the average teen birth rate and are both immigrating and reproducing rapidly.

UPDATE: At Reason, Kerry Howley weighs in helpfully: "...kids are not as malleable as supporters of comprehensive sex ed policies make them out to be. The available evidence suggests that abstinence-only programs have no impact whatsoever. Kids might as well spend the 40 minutes staring at a brick wall. ... You could argue that schools ought to convey accurate rather than inaccurate information about the subject. I would agree with you. But as far as I know, there is no solid evidence that 'comprehensive' sex ed--the relevant alternative--has any impact on sexual behavior either. That's the conclusion of UC Berkeley sociologist Kristin Luker's extremely thorough book on the subject, where she explains why she can't find a single study robust enough to back."