After the failure of abstinence-only education policies, evangelical leaders and institutions have begun to consider promoting preventative measures to combat the country’s rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) sparked controversy when it accepted a grant from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, but the organization defended its decision by saying it is concerned about the abortion rate in the evangelical community. And a wider range of evangelical leaders are beginning to concede that contraception is “a valuable tool in the abortion reduction toolkit.”

And the shift to embrace more comprehensive education that includes forms of contraception may actually be part of a larger shift among younger evangelicals, according to BuzzFeed:

A study released in December by the National Association of Evangelicals found that 44% of unmarried 18-29-year-old evangelicals had been sexually active — but the study defined “evangelical” as someone who attends church at least monthly, believes Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation, and believes the Bible “is accurate in all that it teaches,” requirements that may leave out some who still consider themselves part of the group. Another study puts the figure at 80 percent. And a recent poll found that 44% of 18-29-year-old evangelicals favor same-sex marriage, lower than the national figure but much higher than their elders.

Jonathan Merritt, author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars, sees a shift from an older ideal of virginity — where “you either had it or you didn’t” — to a new ethic of purity which acknowledges that lapses may happen. And he sees a bigger change afoot: “The last generation was very focused on personal holiness. This generation also focuses on the outward expressions of the faith.”

In addition to evolving opinions about contraception and sex before marriage, the increasing number of young evangelical Christians who support marriage equality lines up with other polls showing that most people who say they are religious, including Catholics and mainline Christians, also back marriage equality.

And this is situated within a larger shift away from stringently abstinence-only policies. Even deeply conservative states like Alabama and Mississippi that have opposed comprehensive sexual health instruction for decades are showing some signs of progress in this area.

West Virginia lawmakers are forming a subcommittee to consider the potential shortfalls in the sexual education that public school students currently receive in their health classes. A regular survey of middle and high school students continues to deliver sobering statistics about teenagers’ sexual health — particularly the fact that the overwhelming majority of teens in West Virginia don’t use any form of birth control.

The 2011 survey polled about 40,000 students and found that although more than half of West Virginia’s minors are engaging in sexual activity, a staggering 74.5 percent are not using birth control. That’s only a slight decrease from the 1993 results, when 79.5 percent of teens reported they didn’t use any form of contraception. The number of students who reported they had never learned anything about preventing HIV/AIDS infection also showed little change between 1993 and 2011, barely declining from 12.9 percent to 12 percent.

Doug Chapman, the assistant director of the Office of Healthy Schools for West Virginia’s Department of Education, acknowledged that the bad news in the survey might be an impetus for lawmakers to update the state’s approach to sex ed. “We do need to have better health education,” Chapman told the Register-Herald.

West Virginia does require public schools to offer sex education and HIV education, but there are no standards for ensuring that sexual health material is medically accurate and unbiased by religion. Chapman also pointed out that students at an elementary level don’t receive any comprehensive health information.

However, despite the stark results from the health survey — and the fact that teenage pregnancy isn’t declining at all in West Virginia even as teen birth rates have been plummeting across the country — the state lawmakers on the new panel may be slow to action. The subcommittee hasn’t yet decided whether to recommend a state-wide study to assess the possibility of implementing sex education across the public school system, and some committee members are still clinging to the misguided idea that shame-based abstinence curricula can impart accurate health information to teenagers. “Isn’t [abstinence] always the best way to make sure you don’t get sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies?” one lawmaker said to justify her resistance to teaching sex ed at the grade school level.

Alabama State Rep. Patricia Todd (D), the state’s first openly gay legislator, is once again introducing a bill to repeal the state’s 1992 sex education law, which requires teacehrs to teach that homosexuality is illegal and that “abstinence from sexual intercourse outside of lawful marriage is the expected social standard.” Todd pre-filed the bill ahead of the 2013 legislative session that will begin on February 5.

If the legislature approves the law, then the Alabama Department of Education would be in charge of establishing the state’s sex education programs instead of the legislature:

“The Department of Education needs to be making those guidelines, not the Legislature,” Todd said.

“We need to make sure there is evidence-based education being done in the schools, and all the evidence shows that abstinence-only is not effective.”

The bill would have no effect on the state’s sexual-misconduct law, which makes homosexual acts a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year imprisonment. But it would strike requirements that teachers emphasize “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense.”

Todd sponsored the same bill during the 2012 session along with Republican Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, but it failed to make it out of committee.

Including Alabama, 37 states currently emphasize abstinence in their sexual health curricula. Alabama is one of 19 states that actually require sex education programs to include information about the importance of sex only within marriage. But considering the fact that the states with abstinence-only policies are facing staggering teen pregnancy rates, some conservatives in Mississippi are beginning to slowly move away from abstinence-only education curricula in favor of including contraceptive options as well.

Washington, D.C. just released the results of the nation’s first standardized test measuring students’ knowledge of health and human sexuality. Although high school students were able to answer about 75 percent of the questions correctly, the results confirm that they knew less about practical solutions for sexual health issues, such as how to locate health information and assistance.

The District’s education department administered the 50-question health exam to more than 11,000 students in the city’s public schools and public charter schools last spring, developing age-appropriate assessments for students in grades 5, 8, and 10. Overall, D.C. students correctly answered about 62 percent of the questions on the exam, which focused on health topics like emotional wellness, disease prevention, and sex education. But fifth and eighth graders aren’t as educated about the human body as they should be, and high schoolers could only identify about 40 percent of the correct answers about where they can access more health resources if they need them.

Adam Tenner, the executive director of the community health organization Metro TeenAids, told the Washington Post that although the District’s students still have room for improvement, the exam does represent an important milestone for sexual education efforts:

“In a city with such high rates of HIV, teen pregnancy and STDs — let alone obesity and other diseases that plague our community — we’re not where we should be,” Tenner said in an interview. [...]

But the exam was also hailed by advocates as a step toward understanding — and ultimately decreasing — the city’s high rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy.

Tenner called the test “historic” and praised officials for their willingness to begin examining the root causes of the city’s health problems. Now the question is what needs to be done to make sure schools have what they need to improve health education, he said.

Public schools in Washington, D.C. are required to include medically-accurate sexual health instruction in their health curricula, including information about sexual orientation and HIV prevention, although parents may choose to opt their children out of those courses. But 38 states across the country don’t currently mandate sexual education in schools, and often push misleading, shame-based “abstinence only” programs instead — with serious consequences for their students. One recent survey of sexual education curricula in New York, which doesn’t have specific standards for medically accurate instruction materials about sexual health in classrooms, found that public schools had “shocking gaps” in their sex ed courses.

Although the District’s students are already ahead of the national average, there is still room for improvement, as Tenner points out. Other surveys have found that the majority of college students don’t know how to use the Internet to figure out how to locate contraception, the same lack of knowledge about accessing health resources that D.C. high school students revealed. More comprehensive sexual education curricula could help prevent D.C. students from being in the same situation once they reach their undergrad years.

Even though the increased numbers of young women using effective forms of birth control have contributed to a steady decline in the teen birth rate over the past decade, Mississippi has retained the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation. At an event this week to address the issue of unintended pregnancy in the state, Gov. Phil Bryant (R) told reporters he believes that although most adolescents do know how to obtain and use contraception, “the problem is teenagers do not care enough” about using birth control.

The GOP governor cited an education campaign that his administration sponsored this year as an example of the steps he’s taking to address the problem:

Bryant appointed a group earlier this year to study ways to reduce teenage pregnancy, and it has also sponsored town-hall meetings in Jackson and Lexington. The group has posted several billboards around the state with a photo of a pregnant belly, complete with stretch marks, next to the slogan: “Scars may fade. A baby is FOREVER.” [...]

Bryant told The Daily Leader that town-hall meetings to discuss teen pregnancy are important. “The road to success is in having an open, frank discussion and saying we need to stop this,” Bryant said.

Bryant has said repeatedly that he believes abstinence-only is the best approach to teaching young people about sex. It’s the approach that’s been used for years by the school districts that already were teaching optional classes about sex education.

In fact, Bryant’s approach to reducing the number of unintended pregnancies in his state is directly contradictory. Even though he claims Mississippi’s high teen pregnancy rate is not due to a lack of education about birth control, and rather a disregard for using it, the reality is that many teens choose to forgo contraception because they are grossly misinformed about how effective it is. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about one third of teen mothers decided not to use birth control when they became sexually active because they just didn’t believe they could get pregnant.

And that lack of education about effective contraception is a direct result of the abstinence-only education programs that Bryant supports. Studies have confirmed that when students aren’t given comprehensive, medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, they end up with serious gaps in their sexual education.

A 2011 Mississippi state law requires that some kind of gender-separated sexual education must be offered in public schools, but the school districts are split between providing abstinence-only education classes and “abstinence plus” classes that — while still primarily pushing shame-based abstinence messages — include some mention about some forms of contraception. Even though Bryant’s billboards may be trying to tell teenagers that babies are “forever,” young adults won’t start getting the message about effectively preventing unintended pregnancy until they receive medically accurate information about it.

Young people between the ages of 13 and 24 aren’t getting regularly tested for the HIV virus, even though rates of infection are growing among that demographic, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control finds.

Even though recent gains in HIV treatment and prevention, both here in the U.S. and around the world, have made huge strides in combating the global HIV/AIDS epidemic — so much so that United Nations officials recently declared they believe an end to the epidemic is in sight — the CDC warns that young Americans still need to be more aware of their risk. Young people from 13 to 24 years old contribute to more than a quarter of the country’s new HIV infections each year, but half of HIV-positive individuals between 13 and 24 years old aren’t even aware they have the virus:

Despite a shift in public health messaging to emphasize that early detection and treatment can help HIV-positive individuals stay healthy and reduce the spread of the virus, young Americans aren’t getting the message.

The CDC found that only about a third of those ages 17 to 24 had been tested for HIV in 2010, while just 13 percent of high school students were tested in 2011. That lack of testing is part of the reason those younger than 25 are less likely to seek treatment for HIV, which can also reduce the risk that they transmit it.

“Too few young people are getting tested for HIV,” CDC Director Thomas Frieden said on a conference call with reporters outlining the findings before World AIDS Day on Dec. 1.

CDC officials also confirmed that the HIV epidemic continues to be stratified along racial lines, since African-American males are still at the greatest risk for contracting the virus. The rate of HIV infection among black Americans is nearly eight times than the rate for white Americans, and black youth account for nearly 60 percent of all new infections among Americans between 13 and 24.

The CDC report recommends increasing education programs for youth that emphasize HIV prevention, a discrepancy that is currently furthered by abstinence-only curricula in schools across the country. Just 20 states mandate that public schools must provide both HIV education and sexual education in their health classes, and only 12 states have standards in place to require medically accurate information about HIV in the classrooms.

In 2011, Utah’s Republican-controlled House and Senate passed a bill that would have enshrined abstinence-only education across the state and banned any instruction of birth control, condoms, or LGBT issues in student health classes. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) vetoed the measure to prevent it from taking effect — and now that sexual education courses are mandatory in schools, one Utah lawmaker is proposing additional legislation to expand sexual health resources to parents.

State Sen. Stuart Reid (R) is proposing a bill that would require Utah’s Office of Education to prepare and distribute materials on sexual health to parents, as well as provide seminars to give parents in-person training about talking to their kids about sexual education topics. Reid told the Deseret News that many parents “don’t feel entirely comfortable” talking about sexual topics with their kids and need resources to help them learn how. “There’s reluctance to do that and what’s happened is we’ve turned it over to educators to take that responsibility on what is the most intimate topic in the lives of our children,” Reid said.

Fortunately, Reid’s bill does not seek to roll back the sexual education standards that are currently in place for Utah’s public schools. Health classes will still be required to teach students about physiology and prevention methods for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, although parents can choose to opt their children out of the courses. But Reid says he believes sex education should take place in the home, not in the classroom, and his bill is a reflection of that fact. Opponents to his measure, on the other hand, think it’s unnecessary to train parents to effectively communicate about sexual health:

The bill is only in draft form, but still managed to elicit debate and skepticism from members of the Education Interim Committee on Wednesday. Rep. Jim Nielson, R-Bountiful, expressed concerns about drawing educational resources away from academic core subjects, like reading, writing and arithmetic. Rep. Johnny Anderson, R-Taylorsville, suggested there is already ample resources available online for parents wishing to have a dialogue about sex with their kids.

“There’s a tremendous amount of information for parents who want to broach this with their children,” Anderson said. “This seems to me to be a government solution for a problem that really isn’t ours to own.”

Anderson is correct in his assertion that there are some excellent online resources about sexual health, but he misses the mark when he suggests that sex ed is less critical to youths’ education than “core subjects” like reading and math. In fact, comprehensive sexual education is essential to equip young adults with the resources they need to prevent pregnancy and STIs, understand their own reproductive systems, and develop healthy relationship skills that are centered on consensual experiences. And parents certainly need additional training, since they may not be prepared to effectively teach their children everything they need to know on those topics, just as many parents are not prepared to teach a high school English or math course.

While Reid’s bill could help further educate parents about an important topic they need to talk about with their children, parents’ guidance is not a replacement for comprehensive sex ed in the classroom. Sexual health needs to be talked about at home, but it also shouldn’t be confined to the home. Fortunately for Utah teens, however, the legislation in their state could allow them to have both.

The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced the recipients of a $5 million federal grant designated for abstinence-only education programs. Although President Obama has opposed funding for abstinence-only programs since the beginning of his time in office, his administration created a new community abstinence funding program as part of the 2012 budget.

The Obama administration’s reluctant support of abstinence education has been a concession to social conservatives in Congress. Despite the fact that abstinence-only curricula are ineffective and, in many cases — when young adults make risky sexual decisions after abstinence education fails to equip them with the resources they need — dangerous, conservatives lawmakers have repeatedly pushed funding through.

During the battle to pass Obama’s landmark health care reform law in 2010, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) used the Senate version of the health care reform bill to restore a lapsed program that provides funding for abstinence programs. Although President Obama eliminated the Title V Abstinence Education program in his 2010 budget, finally doing away with the steadily increasing federal funding for abstinence programs that ballooned under the George W. Bush administration, Hatch’s bill — which narrowly squeaked by the Senate Finance Committee — forced the Obama administration to reverse that decision in order to pass health care reform. Similarly, in budget negotiations for the 2012 fiscal year, Congress included a Competitive Abstinence Education Grant Program to require federal funding for abstinence curricula over the next two years.

Earlier this month, the funds appropriated in the 2012 budget were distributed to nine organizations that provide “mentoring, counseling and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity.” Of course, abstinence-only curricula advance those goals while neglecting to impart accurate information about methods to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as failing to include comprehensive discussions about sexuality and the LGBT community.

Although the Obama administration has attempted to take some steps toward eliminating federal funds for abstinence education programs, social conservatives’ insistence on clinging to a misguided approach to sex education has brought the country right back. As the spokesperson for the right-wing National Abstinence Education Association put it, “[Obama administration officials] were specifically tasked by Congress to appropriate these funds for an authentic abstinence education program. So they really had no recourse but to do just that.”

A new survey finds that although the majority of parents are talking about sex with their teenage children, they don’t bring it up often enough and they don’t regularly address more complicated topics surrounding sexuality, like birth control.

The survey — conducted through a partnership between Planned Parenthood, the NYU Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health, and Family Circle magazine — polled parents and teens living in the same households and found significant discrepancies in what each group believed was being conveyed about sex. For instance, parents believe they are having these talks with their kids much more frequently than teens believe their parents are initiating them:

The report finds that while 42 percent of parents say they’ve talked to their teens “many times” about how to say no to sex, only 27 percent of teens agree. In fact, 34 percent of teens say they’ve “never” or “only once” talked with their mom or dad about how to delay sex. Moreover, only small percentages of teens said they plan to discuss these and other sexuality-related topics with their parents in the future. This resistance is likely a result of teens’ discomfort discussing these topics. The results also indicate that parents need to do a better job tackling more-challenging topics, including those involving how teens can act to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

“This survey shows that parents and teens have very different perceptions about how often they’re talking about sex and what’s being said during those talks,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of Education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Parents think they’re giving nuanced advice, but their teens are just hearing directives. We’re offering tips that can help parents talk with their teens in a way that resonates and helps them make smart choices about relationships and sex.”

One of the most troubling findings in the survey is the fact that parents are much less likely to address contraception than other issues, like maintaining healthy relationships and navigating consensual sexual experiences. Only about 30 percent of surveyed parents said they have discussed birth control methods many times with their teens, while less than a quarter of teens said they have discussed the topic many times with their parents. On the other hand, a full 93 percent of parents responded that they believe birth control should be covered in high school sex ed programs, while 78 percent believe that information about birth control should also be provided in middle school.

Although opponents of comprehensive sexuality programs in public schools often claim that conversations about sexuality need to happen at home, these conversations are falling short. While parents agree on the importance of conveying accurate information about sexuality — as well as preventative measures like birth control and condoms — they are struggling to break through to their teens in a way that guarantees the information is being received. Integrating medically comprehensive discussions about sexual health in the classroom is one way to help ensure that, no matter what gaps emerge in the conversations between teens and their parents, teenagers are fully equipped with the information they need to make healthy choices.

A study published in the Pediatrics journal today seeks to examine the connection between teenagers who send and receive sexually explicit messages on their cell phones — “sexting” — and teenagers who engage in sexually risky behavior, such as not using condoms. The study concludes that sexting is correlated with sexually risky behavior, and encourages parents and health officials to talk to teens to discourage the behavior:

Sexting, rather than functioning as an alternative to “real world” sexual risk behavior, appears to be part of a cluster of risky sexual behaviors among adolescents. We recommend that clinicians discuss sexting as an adolescent-friendly way of engaging patients in conversations about sexual activity, prevention of sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancy. We further recommend that discussion about sexting and its associated risk behavior be included in school-based sexual health curricula.

Providing teenagers with accurate information about preventing pregnancy and STIs is certainly an important component of comprehensive sexual education, but concerns about the dangers of sexting are misplaced. Sexting itself is no more inherently dangerous for teens than any other type of sexual expression. Teens who report engaging in sexting are simply more likely to be sexually active than teens who have never sent or received an explicit message — an earlier study on the same subject found that about 86 percent of the teen respondents who sexted reported that they were sexually active, a full 30 percentage points higher than the rate of sexual activity among the non-sexters — and those increased rates of sexual activity lead to an increased potential for unsafe sexual behavior.

Lumping sexting in with actually risky physical behaviors — such as being uninformed about where to find and how to use a range of effective birth control methods — does a disservice to teenagers’ sexuality. While teenagers absolutely need to hear accurate information about practicing safe sex from parents, health officials, and educators, the failures of abstinence education programs demonstrate that stigmatizing sexual expression is not an effective way to ensure healthy behaviors in young adults. Teenagers’ use of technology isn’t directly encouraging them to make risky sexual decisions. Neglecting to adequately address sexual health in the classroom is.