Texas: Don't Divert Funds from HIV Prevention to Abstinence-Only Education!
- by: Emily L.
- recipient: Texas Legislators
Earlier this week Texas Republicans voted to divert funds away from HIV screening programs and into abstinence-only education. This despite the fact that Texas has the third-highest HIV infection rate in the country and the fact that abstinence-only has been proven time and time again to be ineffective.
Rep. Stuart Spitzer authored the amendment, and said his "goal is for everybody to be abstinent until they're married." Yet he also admitted that the abstinence-only programs are not working well, given that Texas' teen pregnancy rate is the fifth highest in the country. His argument for taking the funds from the HIV programs was that those programs could spare the money since they already had a larger budget.
The amendment would increase abstinence-only program spending from $5 million per year to more than $8 million per year. This is an incredibly large amount of money for programs that fundamentally do not work and rely on keeping teens in the dark about the risks of unprotected sex. Please sign this petition telling the Texas legislature to reject Spitzer's amendment in the Texas budget!
Dear [decision maker],
I am deeply dismayed about the passage of Rep. Stuart Spitzer's amendment to the Texas budget that would divert funds from critical HIV screening programs and into ineffective abstinence-only education programs.
Texas has the third-highest HIV infection rate in the country. Screening is a fundamental part of the solution to this devastating problem. And regardless of the opinions or beliefs of Texas legislators, the simple fact is that abstinence-only education programs have been proven to fail throughout the country. Texas has the fifth highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, and those rates are falling rapidly in other states, but only very slowly in Texas thanks to improved education about the realities of teen sex.
Refusing to give information to teens about sex just promotes irresponsible behavior and more mistaken pregnancies. And cutting resources for HIV screening just puts more Texans at risk. Any way you look at it, this is a bad decision.
Please do what you can to make sure this amendment does not make it into Texas' final budget. Thank you for your time.
