New Mexico Abstains

New Mexico abstains from Bush's nanny government abstinence only program.
The state Health Department won't reapply for federal funds to teach abstinence-only sex education, according to department officials.

The state received about $470,000 from the federal government this year that it used to hire contractors for the program, but it won't seek those funds for next year because, officials said, recent research has shown abstinence-only programs are not effective.

Department of Health spokeswoman Deborah Busemeyer cited recently published results from a study by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. that found youth in abstinence-only programs in four U.S. cities "were no more likely ... to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age."

Busemeyer acknowledged that abstinence-only education can be a controversial topic and stressed that department officials are not against teaching abstinence. They do, however, want to use programs backed by evidence, she said.

"We support programs that give scientific, balanced and complete information to our young people so they accept the information and know what to do with it," Health Secretary Alfredo Vigil said in a prepared release.

Busemeyer also said federal abstinence-only funding was irregular — the feds didn't grant funding in 2006 because they felt the elementary-school pupils the state planned to aim at were too young — and created a problem for contractors that provided the programs. "Providers could never count on getting the funds," she said.

The state still will use approximately $400,000 of its own money for sex education to continue to fund other programs such as Plain Talk, which encourages parents and their kids to talk about sex, and the South Valley Male Involvement Project, an anti-violence and anti-teen pregnancy program in Albuquerque's South Valley.

New Mexico is not alone in not applying for abstinence-only funding, Busemeyer said, adding that about 14 other states didn't apply. She said individual programs still can apply to the federal government for funding.