I’ve once paid for Plan B emergency contraceptive, and once for an abortion. I’m not proud of these facts, but it’s part of why my blood boils when I hear about the marvels of abstinence-only sex education.

The abortion was the result of my former partner’s lack of education and also the result of my stupidity. She was raised religiously, went to a religious high school and was only taught that she should abstain from sex until marriage. She didn’t know the first thing about how to prevent a pregnancy, though I didn’t find this out until too late. My mistake was assuming she knew as much as I did, and that we’d be fine.

A new study ordered by Congress shows that abstinence-only sex education programs – like the one my ex-girlfriend was in – have zero effect on abstinence rates among teenagers.

Chris Trenholm of Mathematica, the research firm responsible for this study, said in an interview on National Public Radio: “We don’t find any impacts of the program on sexual abstinence. There’s no difference between the youths in the program group and the youths in the control group and the proportion of who has abstained from sex.”

Teenagers in both groups had sex for the first time at the same average age, a very young 14.9 years.

If these programs have no effect on teenagers, why spend so much money – $179 million annually, according to The Associated Press – on them?

This is money that could be used to subsidize contraceptives so teenagers and college students alike can have access to cheap birth control, something that not even college students will have for much longer.

The Northern Star reported Friday that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 will result in an increase of $30 to $50 for a 30-day supply of brand-name pills.

The $179 million spent annually on abstinence-only programs is enough to pay that $30 to $50 difference for about 300,000 women each year.

Advocates of abstinence-only programs continue their support in the face of this report, saying abstinence needs to be reinforced – that the program needs to be recurring, not just a one-time instruction. If that’s the case, why wasn’t it done that way the first time this program was proposed? Are we to believe that we just need to throw more money at a program that doesn’t work?

Anyone who is sexually active should be informed about contraceptives, whether we think they should be having sex or not. While I cringe at both, I’d rather see a 12-year-old wearing a condom than a 16-year-old pushing a baby carriage.