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Bangor Daily News

Maine is right to reject federal funding that requires the state to focus solely on abstinence-only programs rather than offering comprehensive sex education, including abstinence. There is no evidence that programs that tell children to wait until marriage to have sex actually work. Worse, there is evidence that teenagers who participate in the abstinence-only programs are engaging in risky sexual behavior, increasing their chances of contracting diseases or becoming pregnant.

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Health announced that it did not apply for $165,000 in federal sex education funds for the current year and would forgo $161,000 that becomes available Oct. 1. Maine has accepted such funds since 1998, using them to run ads like the "not me, not now" campaign. However, federal guidelines on the use of the funds have become more stringent and would require the state to emphasize all eight of the program's ideological tenets, such as that faithful, monogamous relationships within the context of marriage are the standard of human sexual activity and that having sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological effects.

California and Pennsylvania are the only other states that have opted out of the federal program. Arizona this month took a more questionable approach using state lottery and tobacco money to begin running television ads encouraging teenagers who are sexually active to use birth control.

The switch came too late for Myra Mendoza, a 17-year-old from Tempe, Ariz., who is due to have a baby in October. "All they tell you in school is 'Don't have sex,'" she said in a recent newspaper interview. "But it's like, kids are going to do it. Most people I know do have sex. They just don't have condoms available, so they end up pregnant or with STDs."

Sadly, Ms. Mendoza's observations are correct. According to a study released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a quarter of

15-year-olds have had sexual intercourse. The percentage steadily increases and, at age 18, 62 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls have had sex. The percentages who have had oral sex are higher. Half of sexually transmitted

disease cases are in people under 24.

A study published several years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that kids exposed to contraception education were not more likely to have sex than those in abstinence-only programs but they were two-thirds less likely to have unprotected sex.

Although a 1999 study found that 98 percent of parents thought their teenagers are virgins, the CDC numbers show that teenagers are having sex. The question then becomes what is the best way to ensure that they protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. The answer, clearly, is condoms and other forms of birth control.