The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice submitted the following testimony in support of Teen Pregnancy and Disease Prevention Programs to the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) appreciates this opportunity to submit testimony.  We strongly support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the dedicated funding streams for abstinence-only programs and to support proven teen pregnancy prevention programs. 

RCRC is an interfaith alliance of national mainstream religious organizations dedicated to ensuring access to reproductive health care and achieving reproductive justice.  For more than 35 years, RCRC has brought together 40 national religious and religiously affiliated organizations from 15 denominations and traditions.  Our membership includes the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church (General Board of Church and Society and Women’s Division, General Board of Global Ministries), the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; and Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism.

As faith communities, we are committed to sex education in our public schools that empowers and protects young people, honors diverse values, and promotes the highest ethical standards. Religious Americans overwhelmingly favor responsible sex education that is complete, age appropriate and includes accurate information about abstinence and contraception.

Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs cannot offer this and moreover they are ineffective.  These programs often are dishonest and scientifically inaccurate.  There is no justification for endangering the health and well-being of the young people of our nation for the sake of a very parochial moral vision.

In fact, while there certainly is great value in adolescents postponing sex until they are mature, federal policies that withhold important life saving information about STDs or HIV/AIDS or other aspects of reproductive health raise serious moral and ethical questions.  Young people have a basic human right to complete and accurate HIV/AIDS and sexual health information.  Without it they will be unable to realize the highest attainable standard of health and for some, their futures will be compromised with disease or unintended pregnancy.

Support of religious communities for comprehensive sexuality education

Major faith traditions representing millions of Americans support comprehensive sex education.  In keeping with our nation’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, they oppose civil laws that would impose specific religious views about sexuality education on all Americans. 

These faith communities take seriously their duty to instill a set of religious and moral values that will help guide young people to responsible life choices.  They believe that it is the role of government to ensure that the nation’s youth receive the facts - unblemished by ideology - that will protect them from disease and unintended pregnancy.  

RCRC has compiled excerpts of official statements of religious denominations and traditions on the importance of sexuality education.  We have attached a copy of the complete document, Religious Communities and Sexuality Education: In the Home, In the Congregation, In the Schools, for your review.  But to give you a brief taste of these statements, please consider the following:

United Methodist Church:
“Children, youth and adults need opportunities to discuss sexuality and learn from quality sex education materials in families, churches and schools.”

            United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
“…supports comprehensive sex education…calls upon the U.S. Congress to cease funding of abstinence only education.”

            Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
“…supports…comprehensive school health education that includes age and developmentally appropriate sexuality education in all grades…”

            Muslim Women’s League
“Sex education can be taught in a way that informs young people about sexuality in scientific and moral terms.”

Episcopal Church
“…we encourage the members of this Church to give strong support to responsible local public and private school programs of education in human sexuality.”

Need for attention to disease prevention

Although the President’s budget does not link the issues of teen pregnancy prevention and disease prevention, we know that the most effective programs are comprehensive and do connect the two.  According to the American Social Health Association, each year 9 million new cases of STDs occur among young people aged 15-24.  Sexually active youth have the highest STD rates of any age group in the country.   Young people are at greatest risk for STDs because, as a group, they are more likely to have unprotected sex. 

The health consequences of STDs include chronic pain, infertility, cervical cancer and increased vulnerability to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.  The transmission of STDs to babies — prenatally, during birth or after —can cause serious life-long complications
and even death.

We urge the appropriations committee to include language that expands the requirement for funded programs to include disease prevention.

How did you learn about sex?

This past year, RCRC put out a request to “tell us your story:  how did you learn about sex?”  We received well over 400 responses from individuals around the country age 17 through 94.  These replies offer thoughtful reflections and often intimate, sometimes painful, glimpses into personal lives. 

Among other things, we found that what you learn – or don’t learn – as a young person can have life-long repercussions.  And abstinence-only programs, by their design, leave out important health information. 

If I had known what sex was, I would have understood what was happening to me when I was molested by a male relative beginning at age 8. – Deborah, 45

I wish I’d learned what intercourse was and how easy it is to get pregnant. – anon, 79

I wish I’d learned about STDs and the way in which they can be transmitted.  I was under the impression that oral sex was safe, since you couldn’t get pregnant from it.  -  Miranda, 26

The good girl/bad girl images prevalent when I was young only served to instill a great deal of fear in me, which negatively impacted on my marriage for years. – anon, 57

Communities of color

According to former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, the black community’s “problem with sexuality has contributed more to the poverty in the black community than anything else in our society.  A pregnant teenager who does not finish high school or marry has an 80% likelihood of being poor.”  She challenged Congress to “stop legislating morals and start teaching responsibility.”  Abstinence-only education has been proved through studies and in harsh reality to be a horrible failure.  A low income woman is four times as likely to have an unintended pregnancy, five times as likely to have an unintended birth and more than four times as likely to have an abortion as her higher-income counterpart.  It is the poor and communities of color who suffer from illogical and ineffective public policy.  The denominations and people of faith that comprise RCRC agree with Dr. Elders that “If I could make any changes at all to the current health care system, you know I would start with education, education, education. You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.”

RCRC addresses these issues through our National Black Church Initiative, a program begun in 1997 to “break the silence” about sex and sexuality in the African American community.  The initiative assists Black clergy and laity in addressing teenage pregnancy, sexuality education and reproductive health within the context of African American religion and culture.  We have worked in over 700 churches providing our “Keeping It Real!” faith based sexuality education curriculum to more than 7,000 young men and women.  We have a similar faith based initiative, La Iniciativa Latina (LIL), which provides model programs on sexuality and reproductive health for Latino youth, adults and clergy in the context of Latino values, religion and culture. 

But the answer to the nation’s high rate of unintended pregnancy and pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases does not rest with churches and non-profit organizations alone.  Public schools must be part of the solution.  We are morally compelled to empower our young people with the knowledge to make responsible decisions.  As Dr. Elders so succinctly stated, “Vows of abstinence break more easily than latex condoms.”  According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, in 2002, the pregnancy rates for black and Hispanic teenagers were each more than two and one-half times the rate for white teenagers.  This is the reality. 

One of the most compelling arguments for comprehensive sexuality education was made by a member of our youth program, a proud Pentecostal Christian from rural Mississippi.  In a meeting with her Member of Congress, she explained that there was no sex education in her high school and a lot of girls in her class got “knocked up.”  They did not graduate from high school.  They did not marry.  Their futures were compromised.  But the impact of these unintended pregnancies goes well beyond the lives of these young women and their children.  They contribute to the economic depression of their communities.

Conclusion

Let’s be real and make a real difference.  We know that 95% of Americans will have sex before they marry; therefore programs need to teach about abstinence and also about contraception, relationships and disease prevention. We must empower youth with the knowledge to make responsible decisions.

We believe that being of faith means being engaged in the world.  And like it or not, the facts are clear:  more than 80 percent of the 750,000 teen pregnancies each year are unintended and 25 percent of American teens contract an STD.  We want our young people to be safe.  For that to happen, they must be informed by comprehensive sex education.  Offering them anything less is irresponsible and dangerous.