On National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Day -- Choose Success, Choose Abstinence

Contact: Sarah Rode, Concerned Women for America, 202-488-7000 ext. 127

WASHINGTON, May 2 /Christian Newswire/ -- The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (NCPTP) has designated May 2 as National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Day.  The NCPTP campaign offers teens all sorts of glitz, products for sale and a quiz designed to inform them about the dangers of teen pregnancy.  They also warn teens against the unrealistic expectations of abstinence programs.

"The problem is," says Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America's (CWA) Beverly LaHaye Institute, "warnings about abstinence programs fly in the face of their concern about teens' well-being.  During the heyday of condom-based programs, the rates of teen sexual activity, teen births and teen abortions grew.  With the wider use of abstinence programs, all the trends have reversed direction and are going down. This reversal of trends in teen sexual activity, births and abortions is a remarkable achievement that the NCPTP ought to be celebrating.  Further, the successes of the abstinence programs ought to be acknowledged, and teens should be encouraged to commit to abstinence.  Could it be that business goals take precedence over the best interest of the teens they are supposed to serve?

"Our culture scoffs at chastity and is shocked to find teenage girls pregnant," Crouse continued.  "Programs that teach primarily contraception as a means of prevention largely ignore teaching values.  This divorce of values from sexuality leads to a diminished respect for oneself, human life and sexuality in general.  Abstinence programs, on the other hand, have been successful in reducing teen pregnancy and abortion as well as sexual activity and provide an opportunity to discuss value-based sexual activity."

Dr. Crouse has just released an important study, "Why the Left is Attacking Abstinence Programs," which uses official government data to track the three trends (teen sexual activity, teen births and teen abortions) to show the dramatic reversal in the trends that coincides with the wider use of abstinence-based programs across the country.

Concerned Women for America is the nation's largest public policy women's organization.