• Thirty-nine percent of female high school students and 45 percent of male high school students in New York State report that they have had sexual intercourse. In New York City, the figures are higher, at 43 percent and 52 percent, respectively.
  • In 2004, the rate of teen pregnancies statewide was 61.9 out of every 1,000 women, accounting for more than 39,000 pregnancies. In New York City, the rate was even higher, with 23,135 teen pregnancies, or a rate of 96 pregnancies per 1,000 women.
  • With 58 percent of teen pregnancies in New York State ending in abortion, the state ranked second in its abortion rate among those aged 15-19.
  • New York State also has the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the country -- 17 percent of all Americans diagnosed with AIDS live in New York. Of the 1,268 teens in the United States aged 13-19 diagnosed with HIV in 2005, more than 10 percent (136 teenagers) lived in New York City.
  • Statistics just released by NYC Dept. of Health show rates of HIV among men 13-19 in New York City doubled between 2001 and 2006 more than 90 percent of those young men were black or Latino.

Financing Ignorance: A Report on Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Funding -- report cover
Click here to download the report (PDF).

The federal and state governments spend an enormous amount of taxpayer money on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs:
  • Since 1981, more than $1 billion has been spent on such programs through three principal federal sources: the Adolescent Family Life Act, section 510(b) of the Social Security Act (Title V) and Community-Based Abstinence Education.
  • In FY 2006, New York received a total of $10,664,612 in federal abstinence-only-until-marriage funds -- the third largest pool of abstinence-only dollars in the country (after Texas and Florida), and the second largest pool of Title V dollars (after Texas).
  • New York matched its Title V dollars with $3,980,000 in state funds and in-kind services.
  • About 53 percent of the funds, at least $6,090,740 in FY 2005, were used by religious organizations without adequate monitoring.
  • Neither the federal nor state governments spend a single dollar on age-appropriate, medically-accurate comprehensive sex education.
A consensus within the medical and scientific communities agrees that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs do not work: In 2006, the Journal of Adolescent Health published a comprehensive survey of all peer-reviewed, and some non-peer-reviewed, studies of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs and concluded that such programs are not effective in changing teens' sexual behaviors. A 2007 study mandated by Congress reached the same conclusion, finding that:
  • None of the individual programs had statistically significant impacts on the rate of sexual abstinence.
  • Programs did not affect the age at which sexually experienced youth first engaged in sexual intercourse.
  • There was no difference between students who had attended Title V-funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs (“abstinence group”) and students who received “only the usual services available in the absence of these programs” (“control group”) in the number of sexual partners with whom they had sex.
  • There was no difference between abstinence and control group youth regarding condom usage.
  • There was no difference between abstinence and control group youth in their expectations to abstain from sex until marriage.
  • Programs had no impact on the number of reported pregnancies, births or sexually transmitted infections.