As part of Alabama conservatives’ nonstop effort to regress everything in the dumbest possible ways, abstinence-only sex education is back again.
An Alabama Senate committee on Thursday gave approval to the 2026 version of a bill by Senator Shay Shelnutt, which mandates that Alabama schools return to the bygone days of yesteryear, when telling kids to “keep it in your pants” was considered proper sex education.
Sigh.
I feel like we’re getting dumber on purpose. Because we have the information. It’s right at our fingertips every single second of every single day. And, in fact, in this case, people are quite literally shouting the pertinent information at Shelnutt. Yet, he, and others, are choosing quite purposefully to ignore it and the reality upon which it is based.
I do not understand why.
There is no upside to staking out the ground that Shelnutt is claiming here. We know through research and thousands upon thousands of studies that abstinence-only education is wholly ineffective. It is not really a debatable point.
The Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all conducted lengthy, peer-reviewed studies of the issue and published findings in medical journals discussing the results. Those results were not nuanced. They were not iffy. They were not up for debate.
Abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t work.
The studies found that not only does it not prevent teens from having sex, it doesn’t even delay teens from having sex. In fact, teens who received zero formal sex education were just as likely to have sex at similar times as those who went through abstinence-only sex ed.
What it does do, however, is make teens less prepared to have safe sex, leading to higher rates of both teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Because those teens have no idea about contraception.
All of this explains Alabama’s current predicament. The state has the seventh-highest rate of teen pregnancies in the country. It has the sixth-highest rate of teen STDs.
Those fantastic scores have been achieved despite years upon years of the state failing to mandate that schools teach any sex education, but requiring those that do to emphasize that abstinence is the only proven protection against pregnancy and STDs. Most Alabama school systems, given those parameters, simply opt for not teaching sex education anymore.
It’s going great.
Some of Alabama’s largest cities, including Montgomery, Mobile and Birmingham, have scored in the top 50 nationally for both the highest rates of STDs and the highest rates of teen pregnancies.
But that’s not good enough for Shelnutt. No sir, he wants the top spot. So, his latest piece of legislation goes a couple of steps further. Instead of simply mandating abstinence, it only strictly prohibits schools from teaching about contraception, providing instructions on where to receive an abortion or displaying “sexually explicit images.”
What world are you living in where teenagers, who have super computers in their pockets, need protecting from sexually explicit images, particularly those typically used when teaching sex ed?
This isn’t about sex ed. It isn’t about quality education. It isn’t about public health.
It’s about Shelnutt’s, and a lot of other Christian conservatives’, hang-ups over sex and having hard, awkward, reality-based conversations with their kids. They’d rather bury their heads in the sand, pretend that reality doesn’t exist and that you can wish your child remaining innocent and pure into existence, instead of being responsible adults.
It’s such a selfish, self-centered approach by the same people who are perfectly willing to put elementary kids through school shooter training rather than adequately regulate firearms. But, I guess, it’s not like they actually have to hold an awkward conversation with their kids about being murdered in their classrooms.
This insistence on abstinence-only education and the denial of teaching about contraception is also killing kids, by the way. It’s destroying their health and their futures. And it’s doing so faster in Alabama than almost anywhere else.
The crazy thing is that other states are having success in lowering the rates of both teen pregnancies and STDs. They’ve implemented proven, effective programs that have produced results. And these things aren’t secret, nor are they more costly to implement.
In the meantime, we keep trying the same thing and acting shocked or helpless when the results keep turning out the same. As if it’s hard to predict that telling a bunch of people whose brains haven’t fully developed that they shouldn’t do something that they really, really want to do. They’re not going to listen.
Sort of like when people tell conservatives about the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex ed.
