Push to reduce teen sex falters

WASHINGTON — The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported Wednesday.

New data from a large government survey show that by every measure, the decadelong decline in sexual activity among high-school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007 and the increase in condom use by teens flattened in 2003.

Moreover, the survey found hints that teen sexual activity may have begun creeping up and that condom use among high-school students might be edging down, though those trend lines have not reached a point where statisticians can be sure, officials said.

"The bottom line is in all these areas we don't seem to be making the progress we were making before," said Howell Wechsler, director of the division of adolescent and school health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, which conducts the survey. "It's very troubling."

The survey contained some good news, finding that risky behaviors such as smoking tobacco or marijuana and not wearing seat belts reached record lows last year.

Among the lifestyle improvements:

• Smoking in the 30 days before the survey fell from a peak of 37 percent in 1997 to 20 percent last year.

• Drinking alcohol in those 30 days fell from 51 percent in 1991 to 45 percent last year.

• Marijuana use in the previous month dropped from a peak of 27 percent in 1999 to 20 percent.

• Riding in that period with a driver who had been drinking dropped from 40 percent in 1991 to 30 last year.

But the sex results, coming on the heels of reports that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and that the teen birthrate has increased for the first time in 15 years, triggered alarm.

"We have a number of signs that are all going exactly in the wrong direction," said Sarah S. Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "All of us in this field are on red alert."

The new figures renewed the debate about sex-education classes that focus on abstinence until marriage, which began receiving federal funding during the period covered by the latest survey and have come under increasing criticism that they are ineffective.

"Since we've started pushing abstinence, we have seen no change in the numbers on sexual activity," said John Santelli, chairman of the Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University. "The other piece of it is abstinence education spends a good amount of time bashing condoms. So it's not surprising, if that's the message young people are getting, that we're seeing condom use start to decrease."

Proponents of abstinence programs dismissed the criticism, blaming "comprehensive" sex education that emphasizes contraceptive use.

"Contraceptive sex education does not provide practical skills for maintaining or regaining abstinence but typically gives teens a green light to activity that puts them at great risk for acquiring STDs or which serve as gateway-to-intercourse activities," said Valerie Huber, of the National Abstinence Education Association.

The new data come from the 2007 survey, which involved 14,103 students in grades 9 through 12 at 157 high schools nationwide.

The proportion of teenagers reporting having sexual intercourse rose steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, fueling a sharp rise in teen pregnancy. The trend reversed around 1991. At the same time, more sexually active teens started using condoms and other forms of contraception. Together, the trends have pushed the U.S. teen-pregnancy rate to historic lows.

"This had been one of the great good news stories in the public-health field, and now we're at grave risk of seeing the good news turn into bad news," said Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Material from McClatchy Newspapers is included in this report.