Valerie Huber

Huber once ran the Ohio Department of Health’s Abstinence Education Program and is president of Ascend, which advocates for abstinence education. The organization started out in 2007 as the National Abstinence Education Association, but Huber doesn’t like that term any longer, so the name has been changed as part of NAEA’s strategic objective of “rebranding the abstinence message to provide positive representation in the public square.” To win the public relations battle, Huber has rebranded “abstinence” and “abstinence-only” as “Sexual Risk Avoidance.”

That may sound like sociological gobbledegook to some people, but rebranding by its very nature requires marketing. And “abstinence-only” with its documented failures is an ever-more tainted model. So change the name of the organization, and change the name of what you’re doing. Voilà! Fresh polish on old shoes. Raggedy shoes.

As Diane Tourjee writes:

One study compared states with abstinence-only programs to those with comprehensive sex education, and found that "abstinence education in the U.S. does not cause abstinence behavior. To the contrary, teens in states that prescribe more abstinence education are actually more likely to become pregnant." Conversely, "states that taught comprehensive sex and/or HIV education and covered abstinence along with contraception and condom use... tended to have the lowest teen pregnancy rates." Furthermore, the Sexuality Information and Education Council for the United States (SIECUS) reports that abstinence-only education is also ineffective in the prevention of STI transmission.

Interviewed at the website of the anti-gay hate group Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine, Huber said, “Sexual risk avoidance is actually a term taken from public health.” She claimed there’s research that shows successful results from sexual risk avoidance programs based on the abstinence (but don’t call it that) model. She didn’t cite any. But she did elaborate:

“I bristle at the terminology ‘abstinence only,’ because our programs are so holistic. They contextualize a whole battery of different topics that surround a young person’s decision whether to have sex or not. Rather than someone telling a young person, ‘Do this, don’t do that,’ it’s casting a vision for a young person’s future.”

Riiiiiiiiiiight.

Here you can listen to Huber explain her organization’s “holistic” approach to abstinence messaging vs. Planned Parenthood’s approach. While Planned Parenthood explains that people can engage in sexual activity without intercourse and remain abstinent, the Ascend/NAEA model is a flat-out no- sexual-activity-at-all-until-marriage, Huber declares. No naked cuddling. No “mutual masturbation.” No watching porn together either.

Every parent would like their children to hold off on making babies, but know, from personal experience if nothing else, that the sex drive is powerful. Large numbers of teens are always going to have sex no matter what they are taught or not taught about it. Which should make abstinence-only programs a no-go from the get-go.

Comprehensive sex education, which should certainly include explaining the advantages of delaying becoming sexually active, is what works. Youths learn about biology, about contraception, about sexually transmitted infections, and, if they’re really lucky, something about sex positive, equal relationships. The Obama administration acknowledged that fact by switching most funding to such programs after 25 years of seeing the feds pour $2 billion into abstinence-only disinformation programs.

Whatever Huber’s exact tasks at HHS will be have not been publicly shared. But given her experience and views, it’s hard to imagine that she won’t be using her post to muck about, working to shift sex education funding back to where it was in the pre-Obama days. Another great addition to the Trump regime.