October is Sex Ed Month of Action and organizers from Advocates for Youth, Catholics for Choice, Choice USA, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), Sierra Club, and Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

It has been said
time and time again: abstinence-only-until-marriage programs don’t work. 
President Obama has called for the end of them in his budget and Members
of Congress in the House and Senate have held firm by letting abstinence-only-until-marriage
funding streams expire. The federal government’s own study
of the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program found these programs to
be completely ineffective at their stated goals. The programs failed to delay sexual initiation—the
entire purported purpose of the programs.

And while the
healthcare reform debate is dominating the news right now; one thing we’re not
hearing enough about is the Hatch abstinence-only amendment, an amendment that
would have a serious impact on sex education in our classrooms.  Voted
into the Senate Finance Committee’s version of healthcare reform 12-11, the
Hatch Amendment lays out a $50 million funding plan to get failed
abstinence-only programs back into our classrooms.

This piece of
healthcare reform will directly impact our everyday lives and its key we show
our legislators we want sex education grounded in fact that teaches us what we
need to know.

The Title V
abstinence-only-until-marriage program expired on June 30, 2009 and, at that
time, had been refused by nearly half of the states both because of the
restrictive nature of the program and the fact that overwhelming evidence has
proven these programs to be ineffective and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

For that reason, October 28 has been declared a National
Call-In Day for Sex Ed by Advocates for Youth, Catholics for Choice, Choice
USA, SIECUS, and RCRC. Thousands of
young people across the country and their allies will be demanding the Hatch abstinence-only
amendment gets stripped from Healthcare Reform.

We need YOU to speak up today!  Let’s put
abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in the history books!

Download the Toolkit and join us on our National
Call-In Day, Wednesday, October 28. Call 1-888-423-5983 to reach your Senators’ office. Ask
them to only fund a comprehensive approach to sex education and to strip the
Hatch abstinence-only amendment from Healthcare Reform.You can find a full script for the
call-in day here.

You can also sign on to a petition in support of the which would authorize funding for comprehensive sexuality
education.

In Solidarity,

Advocates for
Youth, Catholics for Choice, Choice USA, SIECUS, and RCRC