Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has abandoned federal legislation that would’ve required the government to fund only programs found to have “medically accurate” information about abstinence.

But after opponents said — wrongly, according to Lautenberg’s office — that the provision would wipe out funding for abstinence education, the Garden State lawmaker withdrew the provision, called an amendment in legislative parlance.

“We tried to make sure that any information that is passed is reliable, factual and honest. It looked like amendments were going to be offered that were deliberately punitive,” Lautenberg said. “Better judgment suggested that we shouldn’t offer it at this time.”

He said he’d offer it in the future.

Lautenberg previously introduced legislation, Responsible Education About Life Act, to change the government’s abstinence education program.

A report by a House panel found three years ago that 11 of the 13 types of federally funded abstinence initiatives contain “unproven claims and basic scientific errors,” Lautenberg said last week.

A press release issued by Lautenberg’s office stated that the legislation was in response to the Government Accountability Office’s Oct. 2006 “Abstinence Education: Efforts to Assess the Accuracy and Effectiveness of Federally Funded Programs” report. The report found that the federal government doesn’t review the content of major abstinence-only programs for scientific or medical accuracy.

According to the press release:

During the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of federally funded programs using curricula that provide medically inaccurate or misleading information. Some of these medical inaccuracies include teaching young people that HIV can be transmitted by sweat and tears, citing failure rates of condoms as high as 69 percent, as well as giving inaccurate symptoms and outcomes of sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, the federally funded programs provided erroneous information about basic scientific facts, such as stating that human cells have 24 chromosomes from each parent when in fact the number is 23.

This article raises the question of what, if anything, has been done to correct inaccuracies in abstinence education programs. Also, if there isn’t standardized review of curricula, it really seems that schools could be teaching anything they want, as long as it meets the basic criteria of abstinence-only versus comprehensive. Do you think there should be more standardization of sex education programs?

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