Dive Brief:
- Texas Republicans include a controversial sex ed measure into the state's budget amendment.
- The measure cuts HIV and STI prevention funding and instead uses the funds ($3 million) to promote abstinence-only education.
- The measure will have to pass Senate budget negotiations before it becomes law.
Dive Insight:
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, in 2013 Texas ranked third nationally for the highest number of HIV diagnoses. This points to a need for HIV prevention measures.
In the fall Time wrote about the swinging pendulum that is sex education in America. According to the magazine in the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, sex education that went beyond abstinence became more accepted. In fact, in an attempt to curb the transmission of this new disease, in 1986 Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made the recommendation that sex ed discussions began earlier and in more graphic terms.
This, however, is not so much the case anymore. According to Time In 2014 there were 50% fewer states requiring sex education in all public schools than there were twenty years earlier in 1994.
In December Congress passed its new spending package, which included a provision that gives states extra funding if they agree to an abstinence-only sex education curriculum. The language in the provision says states are only eligible for the funding if they have a law on their books that require sex ed to teach students that sex before marriage is "likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects," and that avoiding it is "the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”