Even though they claim to be pro-family, some politicians want the government to act like Mommy and Daddy. President Bush’s abstinence program is a good example of this unfortunate willingness to adopt nanny-state policies. But like almost everything the government does, abstinence programs are an expensive failure. The UK-based Guardian reports on the latest research:

It’s been a central plank of George Bush’s social policy: to stop teenagers having sex. More than $1bn of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 — posters printed, television adverts broadcast and entire education programmes devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys. The trouble is, new research suggests that it hasn’t worked. At all. A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.