Thomas Askew said he would be on death row if it were not for the influence of the abstinence program “Choosing to Excel.”

Once a violent gang member without direction, Askew said his friends from junior high school were responsible for shootings earlier this year in Ark. He explained that he probably would have been with them if it had not been for the mentoring he received from abstinence programs in junior and senior high school.

Askew, 19, is one of nearly 500 students across the nation who traveled to Washington, D.C. to take part in "Abstinence Week."

Participants spent the week of March 8 attending events and lectures as well as lobbying and visiting Congress members and city councils concerning the effectiveness of abstinence programs. In December 2008 the Department of Health and Human Services reported that abstinence education programs receive only 22 percent of federal funding for adolescents.

“If we can even out the playing field, not just locally but nationally, then the message will get out and we can show people that you have two choices,” Askew said.

Abstinence programs, which encourage students to refrain from sex until marriage, are federally funded for students ages 12 to 18. Askew said the programs attempt to promote a holistic approach through focusing less on "not having sex" and more on healthy lifestyles.

A typical abstinence program discusses the emotional and physical consequences of sex through identifying a student's future goals as well as recognizing ways that sexual activity before marriage could hinder the goals.

This year Abstinence Week landed during a devastating time for its participants. The week coincided with Obama’s signing of the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, which cut abstinence funding by $14 million.

This move has been applauded by advocates of comprehensive sex education, who have called abstinence education a waste of money. Comprehensive sex education addresses abstinence and contraception in a manner advocates view as both age-appropriate and medically accurate. Proponents, such as Planned Parenthood, which has called abstinence-only programs "one of the Religious Right's greatest challenges to the nation's sexual health," view the signing of the Omnibus Act as a progressive step toward the complete removal of abstinence education funding.

But, like Askew, many of the college students attending Abstinence Week are former high school students whose passion for abstinence education in their own lives convinced them, along with high school and junior high students from around the country, to make the fourth Abstinence Week the largest.

According to Askew, his program defined abstinence as staying away from any behavior that might take him down or hinder his future. This included drinking and drugs to sexual activity, and he said this changed his entire life.

National Abstinence Education Association Executive Director Valerie Huber said that most people don’t know that as abstinence education funding has been more broadly applied federally, there has been a dramatic decrease in teen pregnancy, birth rates and sex initiation rates.

She believes that the main reason abstinence education is viewed as ineffective is because it has not been properly represented.

“Unfortunately, those who oppose abstinence education really crafted and defined the approach for the general populace because we didn’t have a mouthpiece for that until NAEA was formed as a professional association to do that,” Huber said. “I’m tired of our opponents making this such a high-pitched partisan ideological debate. The losers are going to be the students who are benefiting from this.”

Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a speaker at Thursday's Abstinence Week luncheon, said he believes that abstinence education is critically important because comprehensive sex education is “comprehensive condom promotion."

“The goal of education shouldn’t just be to encourage kids to use contraception. It should be much broader than that,” Rector said.

Rector said that liberal interest groups, specifically a group called SIECUS, as well as Advocates for Youth and Planned Parenthood, have sought to abolish abstinence education since it began, around 10 years ago.

Rate: