Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs

Since fiscal year 1998, the Title V, Section 510 program has allocated $50 million annually in federal funding for programs that teach abstinence form sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for school-age children. A new impact report from Mathematica’s congressionally mandated multi-year evaluation of four abstinence education programs finds that the programs had no effect on the sexual abstinence of youth. But it also finds that youth in these programs were no more likely to have unprotected sex, a concern that has been raised by some critics of these programs.