This is part two of a three-part series. Part one found here.

"Every young person deserves to know they have the choice to be abstinent."

Luis Galdamez, sharply dressed in a black suit and white shirt that seems to reflect the conference's "Black and White" theme, goes next.

"As a Hispanic living in this country, I'm grateful for the abstinence community," he says. "I came to America and got the wrong American Dream — I thought it was all sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I guess I bought the lie."

Like many abstinence advocates, Galdamez is a late convert to the movement. He has children, and though he doesn't say it directly, it's implied that at least some of his offspring resulted from his youthful days of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. His spiel smacks a little of the "sex for me, but not for thee" ethos: "Sure, I had lots of sex when I was a kid, but if you do it you'll destroy your life!"

Not that I think for a second that Galdamez is insincere in his belief that abstinence is the way forward. He's eloquent when he says, "My crusade is simple: I want to help my people." But he adds, "Bold new vision is what we need in this country, and that means to go back to the basics." And the basics, he makes clear, means no sex before marriage and marriage for life, come what may.

After noting that his son is studying to be a pilot at college, just like Galdamez claims he once wanted to do, he concludes, "My kids will get married one time, and they will have kids, and they will not have multiple homes." It sounds lovely. But who plans for divorce?

Julie Laipply, another motivational speaker and ex-beauty queen, chimes in, "Every young person deserves to know they have the choice to be abstinent." Later, she adds darkly, "I find that for me it's not the young people who have the problem with this program [abstinence]." Thus, I'm forced to wonder: Who is it who's standing in the door, shouting at kids that they must have sex, and right quick? Who, exactly, is opposed to people choosing for themselves whether or not to have sex?

"I think it's widely recognized that abstinence and delaying the sex act is a good thing," said Heather Boonstra, a senior policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute in an interview with Minnesota Monitor. "Part of the challenge is that adolescence is a time of change. At [age] 15, you might not be sexually active, but in a few short years, you may be. And part of the challenge is to get students ready for that."

Writer Amanda Marcotte agreed. "If you go to any sex education website of any major organization you'll see abstinence listed as an option for birth control, for STD prevention, in all those various ways. Planned Parenthood has a list of failure rates for contraception, and abstinence is always on it."

Boonstra was not complimentary about the programs pushed by the NAC. "They follow a very rigid definition of abstinence," she said.

She's right. Unruh has been quoted by Planned Parenthood as saying masturbation is "the first step to sexual addiction."

Boonstra lamented what she says is a $1 billion cumulative federal price tag for recently-added abstinence programs.

"They didn't have the evidence for that kind of scale-up."

* * *

Libby Gray Macke speaks next on why programs like her ProjectReality.org are completely based on scientific evidence.

"Our programs have been evaluated by the Northwestern University School of Medicine," she says, adding sardonically, "I think they're a real university." Indeed, Northwestern University has evaluated the program. And it gets reasonably good marks for teaching students that abstinence is a good thing, at least in surveys taken immediately post-course.

But as the evaluation itself says, "There are limitations to this evaluation. The absence of a control group makes it difficult to know whether these changes would have occurred over the same period of time (two to six weeks) without intervention. However, this seems rather unlikely in that generally, if any changes occur naturally, teens tend to become more permissive in their attitudes about sexual activity over time. All the changes in survey responses were consistent with the design of the program. Secondly, the question may arise that youth are merely reporting what they believe the program teachers want to hear. However, all surveys were anonymous and done within the context of a normal classroom environment thus reducing the demand characteristics on youth responses. And, even if youth were merely reporting back what they had heard, that would be evidence that they clearly had heard the Game Plan message."

And hearing the message is all well and good — but the other major limitation to the evaluation is this: Outside of the post-test survey, there's no measurement of whether there's any follow-through in the lives of students. Given that 95 percent of Americans engage in premarital sex, there's plenty of reason to question whether the 67 percent of students who said in the study they plan to be abstinent are being honest, either with themselves or with others. Indeed, given that 55 percent of the students said they already had planned to be abstinent, there's plenty of reason to question the study, period.

As Boonstra said, adolescence is a time of change, and what a teenager believes at 2:12 in the afternoon on Thursday can change by the time she's out on a date on Friday.

But the pro-abstinence forces don't really seem to be in the mood to be questioned.

"I'm angry," says Keith Deltano of VirginityRocks.com, a pro-abstinence comic. "If you in the media want to break a story, here's one to break. Because I keep telling people these [statistics], and they don't get reported. This really works." Noting that Georgia initiated abstinence-based education in Georgia in the mid-1990s, he says, "in the past 11 years…the teen pregnancy rate in 1996 was 68 per 1,000, and in 2005 it was 36.8 per 1,000. These are facts, you can look them up."

We'll leave aside that that's a nine-year window, because Deltano's larger point stands: Teen pregnancy rates are down in Georgia, but not nearly as much as he claims. Teen pregnancy rates in Georgia were already going down under the bad old system he decries — from 126 per 1,000 in 1992 to 107 per 1,000 in 1996, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And they dropped to 95 per 1,000 in 2004, according to the National Campaign to End Teen Pregnancy. If anything, the rate of decline appears to be slowing significantly since abstinence-based education began in Georgia.

And this is the statistic Deltano quotes as breaking news.

It's understandable, of course, because other statistics are worse. Talking of a study by Mathematica Policy Research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Boonstra says, "The Mathematica report looked at what were thought to be the most promising programs in the country. They didn't find any positive outcome in terms of delaying sex."

Indeed, the similarities between students being taught abstinence-only sex education and those who weren't are stunning. Forty-nine percent of abstinence-only students in the study remained "always abstinent," exactly the same as the control group. Abstinence-only students were slightly more likely to be abstinent over the past year — 56 percent to 55 percent — but that's not enough to be statistically significant. It's not necessarily an indictment of the abstinence-only movement. But given the millions to billions of dollars spent on it, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement, either. No wonder Deltano chooses to address teen pregnancy rates in Georgia instead.

Part One: "There Are a Lot of Fallacies That Need to Be Undressed"