Under the Glass Lies, damned lies, statistics… and the Washington Post on virginity

Jan 6, 2009

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Mark Twain said, quoting Benjamin Disraeli.

But Twain would have probably added a fourth type of lie to Disraeli’s list after reading the recent Washington Post article "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," phony science used to push ideology.

What the author of the piece, Rob Stein, tries to lead his readers to believe, is clear from the subtitle: "Teenagers Who Make Such Promises Are Just as Likely to Have Sex, and Less Likely to Use Protection, the Data Indicate."

But reading through the article, the much promised "data" actually evaporates.

First, it begins with the careful use of the conditional tense, in stark contrast with the blunt headline.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

The data then becomes even more threadbare when the methodology used by the specialist-du-jour is explained:

Rosenbaum analyzed data collected by the federal government's National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which gathered detailed information from a representative sample of about 11,000 students in grades seven through 12 in 1995, 1996 and 2001.

Although researchers have analyzed data from that survey before to examine abstinence education programs, the new study is the first to use a more stringent method to account for other factors that could influence the teens' behavior, such as their attitudes about sex before they took the pledge.

Rosenbaum focused on about 3,400 students who had not had sex or taken a virginity pledge in 1995. She compared 289 students who were 17 years old on average in 1996, when they took a virginity pledge, with 645 who did not take a pledge but were otherwise similar. She based that judgment on about 100 variables, including their attitudes and their parents' attitudes about sex and their perception of their friends' attitudes about sex and birth control.

Behind the carefully chosen scientific lingo, a fact emerges for anyone reading a little more carefully: Rosenbaum goes to the well of the same boring and blind data used in previous, inconclusive investigations. There is nothing really new, no interview with specific persons, no identification of individual cases, no follow-up on personal patterns.

There is, therefore, no real investigation or study. It is only about Rosenbaum’s interpretation of information already collected seven years ago, but this time based on 100 "variables."

The question is: How did Rosenbaum come up with those 100 variables? The answer is simple. She chose them at will. What criteria did she use to choose them? The author of the article does not say, but it is easy to imagine that Rosenbaum chose the ones that would not take her new "conclusions" too far from an essay she wrote in 2006, when she was still a student at Harvard, eloquently entitled: "Reborn a Virgin: Adolescents’ Retracting of Virginity Pledges and Sexual Histories."

Rosenbaum has clearly an issue with abstinence programs in general and virginity pledges in particular.

And her issues come in handy for the timing and the true purpose of the article:

"The findings are reigniting the debate about the effectiveness of abstinence-focused sexual education just as Congress and the new Obama administration are about to reconsider the more than $176 million in annual funding for such programs."

The "findings" are "reigniting the debate?" What debate? Who is debating? Stein wants you to think that there is actually a "debate…" to which he is already offering you a conclusion. The non-existing "data" and Rosenbaum are just the excuse to ask Obama to cut funding for abstinence-only programs and re-direct them to contraception-only ones. But of course, Stein doesn’t want to seem opinionated, so here comes the useful "pundit" to drop the real warhead for which the article is the missile:

"This study again raises the issue of why the federal government is continuing to invest in abstinence-only programs," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "What have we gained if we only encourage young people to delay sex until they are older, but then when they do become sexually active -- and most do well before marriage -- they don't protect themselves or their partners?"

Never mind that the board of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy is a "who is who" of pro-abortion and pro-artificial birth control activists. Also, never mind that the organization has been systematically advocating against abstinence programs, ignoring several studies showing that young people who took the pledges in fact had lower rates of STDs, and engaged in fewer risky behaviors. They never follow the real data. Instead, they have been in the business of creating Rosenbaum’s type of data to follow their ideology.

Being the piece of propaganda that it is, the article cleverly uses a quote from Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association to serve as a token bow towards an "objective" perspective.

"It is remarkable that an author who employs rigorous research methodology would then compromise those standards by making wild, ideologically tainted and inaccurate analysis regarding the content of abstinence education programs."

Actually, it is not remarkable at all. It is just the boring 101 of how to deliver ideology under the disguise of science and journalism. Boring, but lethal, nonetheless.

Alejandro Bermudez

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