There is hard evidence that in Africa abstinence and fidelity programmes are effective in the fight against HIV/AIDS. (See ‘The Invisible Cure’ by Helen Epstein). 

Therefore, why should it surprise us that abstinence programmes in Western countries are also successful? 

Actually, what Epstein catalogues in her excellent book is the tremendous resistance on the part of many Western aid workers to the evidence that ABC programmes (‘Abstain’, ‘Be faithful’, use a ‘Condom’) actually work. As such worker put it, they didn’t want to “give succour” to Christians. 

In America they have been trying out abstinence programmes for some time now in their classrooms. There has been huge resistance to these programmes and a readiness to dump them before any clear evidence was in as to their efficacy. The resistance was ideological. Secular sex educationalists hate the abstinence message. 

But now a major study has been published in the US which shows that abstinence programmes can work. The study has been described as “game-changing”. 

What it shows is that when a particular abstinence programme was tried on more than 600 African-Americans aged 11-13, around half did not have first sexual intercourse within the next two years. 

However, among another group of similar children who were taught lessons that combined contraceptive education with abstinence training, only a third did not have first sexual intercourse in the next two years. 

That is a dramatic difference. What it shows, yet again, is that in the debate about sex education and sexual behaviour and morality it is not traditionalists who have their heads in the sands and are ignoring reality, it is the so-called liberals. They simply don’t want to hear the sex revolution isn’t panning out as they hoped and that their sex ed programmes don’t work half as well as they think they do. Worse, the more traditionalist (common sense) alternatives work better.