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BOSTON

I put on’t tell this to disparage your willpower. Hang onto that celery stick for much loved life. And even if you stop doing those stomach crunches and disturb sneaking confused for a smoke, at least you can comfort yourself with fond memories of your moment of resolution.

Compare that to the statistic in the newest research about teens who pledge self-denial. The majority not only break the pledge, they forget they ever made it.

This study of teens and pledges comes from Johns Hopkins researcher Janet Rosenbaum, who took a hard look at nearly 1,000 students. She compared teens who took a pledge of self-restraint with teens of similar backgrounds and beliefs who didn’t. She found absolutely not one jarring in their sexual air, or the age at which they began having sex, or the number of their partners.

In fact, the only contest was that the form into groups that promised to remain abstinent was significantly less credible to employment birth control, especially condoms, when they did have sex. The lesson many students seemed to keep in possession from their abstinence-only program was a negative and inaccurate view of contraception.

This is not just a primer on the capacity for teenage denial or the inner workings of growing neurobiology. What makes this study important is simply this: “virginity pledges” are common of the ways that the conduct measures whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges being of the class who proof that teens will refrain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.

We have been in this place before. And before that. And previous to that.

When he was running for president, George W. Bush promised, “My administration will elevate temperance education from an afterthought to every urgent goal.” Over the past eight years, a cottage industry of “abstinence-only-until-marriage” purveyors became a McMansion industry. Funding increased from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million in 2008. That’s a grand mass of $1.5 billion in treaty money for an ideology in make search of a methodology. And moiety the states refused funds to pay for sex mis-education.

By at this time, there’s an archive of scrutiny showing that the binge was a bust. Programs mandated to teach “the social, psychological and health gains (of) abstaining from sexual activity” and to warn of the dangers of having sex fall been awarded failing grades for truth and effectiveness. As Rosenbaum says, “Abstinence-only education is required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.”

Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as more mortgage lenders. It manufactures a product as ill-suited to the environment as the SUV. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of doctrine of the evolution of ideas over learning.

The painful part is that sex education got caught in the culture wars. It has been framed, says Bill Albert of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as a battle between “those who wanted virginity pledges and those who wanted to workmanship out condoms to 14-year-olds.”

Meanwhile, six in 10 teens own sex in front of they leave high exercise and 730,000 teenage girls order get pregnant this year. We see them everywhere from “Juno” to Juneau

The overwhelming majority of protective parents don’t want a political battle. They craving teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The programs that work best combine those lessons.

Soon Congress and the new administration will be asked to ante up again for abstinence-only programs. As Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone asquint.. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t spot to a single study that says this helps. If it doesn’t help, why fund it?”

Teens are not the only masters of denial. But we are once for all stepping back from the culture wars. We are, through luck, returning to a part that used to be diffuse

ellengoodman@globe.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008581338_opin02goodman.html?syndication=rss