Study Debunks Abstinence Claims

One of the loudest cries of abstinence-only education supporters is that teaching teens about condoms encourages them to have sex. But a new analysis of more than 174 studies on the subject blows that claim out of the water. HIV prevention programs that provided condoms and information about their use did not affect their participants' number of sex partners or the number of times the participants had sex, and they did not lead to earlier initiation of sex, according to the analysis. In fact, the opposite was true'condom programs resulted in a reduction in the number of sex partners and the number of times the participants reported having sex.