New Mexico, together with states like Arkansas, Texas, and Mississippi, lead the country in teen pregnancy. According to 2008 figures published by the federal Centers for Disease Control, The Land of Enchantment trails only Mississippi in teenage births.

Also according to the CDC, 15 percent of New Mexico high school students had four or more sexual partners, based on a nationwide 2009 survey. Only 57 percent of high school students in the state used a condom during their most recent episode of sexual intercourse. Meanwhile, roughly 15 percent of high school-aged females were on birth control, while the national median is nearly 24 percent.

New Mexico students are also behind their national peers in sexual education. The same 2009 CDC survey indicates 77 percent of high school youth were taught about HIV/AIDS in school, compared to the U.S. median of nearly 86 percent.

A chart by the reproductive health research group The Guttmacher Institute demonstrates while sexual and HIV education is mandated in New Mexico, there are no requirements on the lessons being medically accurate or age appropriate.

Teen pregnancy is also costly: with minimal private healthcare options for young girls, the state ends up paying some $590 million on youths giving birth, according to New Mexico Department of Health figures.

“Comprehensive sexual education is one of the strategies that work to reduce teen pregnancies and STIs,” says Sylvia Ruiz, executive director of New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition.

But she also says school-based sexual education is the most controversial.

“We have local school board control in New Mexico, and school boards decide what curricula will be decided on STI,” she told TAI.

Still, other programs outside of the classroom exist to target students and parents on improved sexual education.

The state partnered with Ruiz’ group through a series of community outreach programs to provide a fact-based curriculum for parents and students in Albuquerque. Internal surveys show that 52 percent of teenagers feel their parents would not support their use of birth control while less than 40 percent say they’ve spoken to parents about contraception.

Parents, according to the survey, are hesitant to approach their children, too, with 48 percent  relieved or happy when approached by their children on sexual matters.

The state also takes part in Cuidate, a CDC-sponsored HIV/AIDS outreach initiative targeting Hispanic communities.

“Naturally we want parents to transfer sexual health values to their children,” says Ruiz. “But if your family is poor, struggling with rent and bills, it’s really hard… to retransfer values of reproductive health to kids.”

But the state could use more family-based education, especially in the greater Albuquerque area. Though the major metropolitan region, and Bernalillo County in general, has a lower rate of poverty than the rest of the state, the region beats many counties in the number of STI cases annually. Only four counties have a higher incident rate of Chlamydia, and Bernalillo has the third highest number of Gonorrhea cases, with 687 and 94 incidents per 100,000 people, respectively, reported in 2010.

Emphasizing the role of responsible decision-making among an adult woman is telling. Premarital sex and sex education have been among major policy concerns for PFC, an 18-year-old Focus on the Family affiliate. In recent years, PFC has strived to maintain the state’s pro-abstinence-only sex-education law, which stresses an emphasis on “abstinence and the risks associated with sexual activity outside of marriage.” Through its legislative influence and political connections, the PFC has been able to wield power in South Carolina when it comes to sex education and other social-issue policies. On the national level, that power has translated into federal funding for social-policy-related grants and, potentially, some sway in the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

Federal funding for abstinence-only education

In 2007, PFC commissioned a survey (PDF), polling registered voters about sex education in state public schools and on whether teens’ access to contraception (including condoms) should be restricted. Data for the “South Carolina Youth Sexuality Survey” was collected by the researchers at the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Public Service and Policy Research (IPSPR), but the questions were drafted by PFC staff. Those questions included:

• Do you favor or oppose the current law, which allows teenagers to obtain contraceptives without parental permission? (53 percent opposed)
• Would you favor or oppose a law providing parents with a registry to tell the State Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) whether they want condoms or other contraceptives provided to their children? (58 percent favored)

The survey included the disclaimer: “None of the research contained in this document is intended to advance or defeat any specific federal or state legislation.”

In 2008, the PFC was awarded $3 million in federal funding to implement its premarital-sex philosophy into abstinence-only sex-education curriculum in South Carolina schools. Through President George W. Bush’s controversial Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) program — distributed through the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — PFC received about $1.2 million of the award to create a social-networking platform through which to communicate abstinence-only sex-education curriculum. Following government reports (PDF) suggesting the CBAE program was ultimately ineffective and promoted medical inaccuracies (PDF), the Obama administration canceled all CBAE funding at the end of 2009; thus, PFC never received its remaining $1.8 million.

The $1.2 million went to creating a website that relied heavily on the state’s religious community and existing sex-education curriculum produced by a nonprofit with a controversial history that was simultaneously receiving support from CBAE for other projects, according to grant documents obtained by The American Independent under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In its application for the CBAE grant, PFC included an endorsement letter co-signed by 15 state House representatives and another letter co-signed by eight state senators, which stated, in part: “We have come to trust Palmetto Family Council and the members of its board of directors are well known to us.” South Carolina U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, Rep. Joe Wilson and former Reps. Bob Inglis and James Gresham Barrett, all Republicans, also asked the federal government to fund PFC’s abstinence project.

BTrue: Where the money went

In a youth-produced video, four African-American girls are sitting on a couch, laughing loudly and talking about their day at school. Chatter is interrupted when one of them, staring at her cell phone, says: “Hold on, y’all, we got a text. Oh, she ain’t pregnant! Congratulations! Woo!” The girls start shouting in glee and dancing. Cut to the next scene, the same four girls are walking down the street when they receive another text from their absent friend. The girls gather around the phone to read: “I’m not pregnant but I feel dirty — I hate myself.”

This one-minute-24-second video, titled “Negative,” is an example of the pro-abstinence social media network PFC created through the CBAE grant, the stated purpose of which was to teach “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

In October 2008, PFC began implementing the BTrue Youth Leadership Project, which was originally called Palmetto Youth Network (PYN). The network is still functioning but has not been updated since spring 2010; the 25 videos have on average accrued between five and 25 total hits.

“Though cancelled less than halfway into its project life, the multimedia nature of the curriculum has allowed the outstanding content created by the BTrue students to live on in cyberspace as a unique course in adolescent sexuality,” Smith said in an email.

Aside from the student-made video series, PFC created a Facebook-style network where students sign up and can create personalized profiles. All members have access to the videos and a YouTube-style animated series called BTrueTube, which consists of abstinence-education curriculum created by Heritage Community Services, a 16-year-old nonprofit based in Charleston, S.C., whose Heritage Keepers abstinence-only curriculum was widely used in federally-funded abstinence-education programs. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US (SIECUS) — founded in 1964 by a former Planned Parenthood medical director – has long been a critic of the Heritage Keepers curriculum, claiming it relies on scare tactics over education and shuts out gay and lesbian students by only teaching about sex in the context of heterosexuality.

For the two years PFC received federal dollars to fund this abstinence project, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) granted the majority of PFC’s grant request based on budget justifications PFC submitted to the government each respective funding year. Despite having been awarded $600,000 both years, in 2009, PFC only requested (and received) $570,994 to be spent on a seven-member personnel team ($160,500), fringe benefits ($32,100), travel to project-related conferences ($6,628), supplies ($8,000), contractual ($269,800) and “other” ($93,966).

The largest chunk of money was allocated for contract work from three firms: Heritage Community Services for the curriculum ($160,600); the Institute for Research & Evaluation for a third-party evaluation of the project ($65,000); and McAlister Communications to provide content development, site management, and system management ($44,000).

During 2008 and 2009, Heritage Community Services also received $1.2 million from ACF (separate to the contracting money it was paid by PFC) for CBAE grants. Since its inception, Heritage has received widespread national attention for its message that abstinence is the only reliable way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections, and for receiving most of its funding from the federal government. In 2008, the Post & Courier reported that Heritage had received or been allocated more than $23 million in state and federal money since 1997. In 2009, Heritage received $850,930 in federal abstinence-education and Healthy Marriage grants, according to records from HHS’s Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS).

A separate $12,400 was also requested to outsource maintenance, development and hosting of PFC’s BTrue website, as well as user tracking and “back-end administration.”

Part of the consequences of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) 2008 assessment of CBAE was a new requirement that all grant recipients would have to include a third-party evaluation of their projects. PFC’s was to be conducted by the Institute for Research & Evaluation’s founder and board chairman Stan Weed, a longtime social policy researcher who has testified before Congress on behalf of various policies. Weed, a Brigham Young University graduate, began his career working as a researcher for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1972 to 1989. Despite the GAO’s call for an independent third-party evaluator, the Institute for Research & Evaluation (IRE) was affiliated with Heritage Community Services. In fact, Weed developed the “predictors of adolescent sexual initiation,” which is taught to Heritage educators during their training.

Though Weed is identified as the project evaluator in the CBAE grant records, it was not Weed but Paul Birch, now a senior research associate at Evans Evaluation, who evaluated the project. Birch, who no longer works for IRE (once the CBAE funding was canceled, IRE lost its main revenue source and now only Weed works there, focusing on AEGIS character education curriculum), told TAI he gave PFC’s project high performance marks.

“The program produced sizeable and significant effects on several proven predictors of youth sexual activity including their belief about the value of abstinence, their efficacy that they could abstain from sex, and their intention to do so,” said Birch in an email. “These initial effects persisted several months after the program. The only weakness noted was the difficulty in getting youth to come to an afterschool program consistently and the fact that we were not able to collect long term behavioral outcome data since the funding was eliminated. Students who came to the program were overwhelmingly positive about it, which is to be expected as they volunteered to come in the first place, but is encouraging that they were not disappointed.”

Heritage Community Services could not be reached for comment. Smith did not comment on any potential conflict of interest but said that Heritage and IRE were selected based on merit and reputation.

“We chose the Heritage curriculum for a number of reasons, including its medical accuracy, its history with the HHS CBAE program, its quality, and its technical support capabilities,” Smith said in an email. “We also felt Heritage Keepers ideal for ease of conversion to a multimedia format. We chose Dr. Weed and his associate Dr. Birch based on their academic and organizational track record and their history with the HHS CBAE program.”

The success of the project was measured by survey answers obtained September 2010 from the approximately 200 South Carolina youth involved in the project. For example:

• The proportion of youth leaders that have never had sexual intercourse and remain abstinent: 95%
• The proportion of youth leaders that have had sexual intercourse but have discontinued having sex: 95%
• The proportion of youth leaders saying they have a strong commitment to wait until marriage to have sex: 100%
• The proportion of youth leaders indicating they would not have sex if someone asked them to: 95%
• The proportion of BTrue youth saying they have a strong commitment to wait until marriage to have sex: 60%

PFC’s grant proposal included letters from churches and Christian academies across the state offering to donate access to meeting space and teenagers. The Rev. Joe Price, board chairman of the Greer Christian Learning Center, told TAI that during the first two years of the BTrue Youth Leadership Project, Greer Christian provided PFC with access to about 600 students from Greer Middle School and Riverside High School. Price, who is an associate pastor at Washington Baptist Church, said PFC’s project was “outstanding” and that it gave students graphic information on STIs. When the curriculum was brought into churches, it was even better, Price said, because “they could actually use the Bible.”

From Bloomberg:

The pledges, made orally or in writing, are viewed by advocates as buttressing federally funded education programs that say avoiding pre-marital sex rather than using protection will curb pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. President George W. Bush’s administration more than doubled the budget for abstinence-only education programs since 1999 to $204 million this fiscal year. More than a dozen states have rejected federal money rather than limit what is taught.

“The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially abstinence-only sex education participants.”

A 2007 congressional study (PDF) found that abstinence-only programs have “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence,” and students who participate in them become sexually active at the same age and have as many partners as students who participate in more comprehensive sex-ed programs. With Democrats set to control the presidency and both houses of Congress, these studies should spell the end for abstinence-only education.

Ironically, that could be good news for conservatives who are honest about their desire to decrease the number of abortions and curb the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases.