Budget discussions will resume soon on Capitol Hill, and family advocates say abstinence education will be overlooked if parents don’t take action. 

“The next four to six weeks are critical in determining whether or not abstinence education is going to be inserted in the 2011 budget,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. 

Huber points out that while President Obama had zeroed out abstinence-education funding in his budget proposal, bipartisan efforts in the Senate allocated at least $50 million over the next five years through the health care reform plan. 

That’s only one-seventh of all the federal funding Obama is proposing in the 2011 budget for sex ed, which leaves $285 million for condom-based sex-education programs. 

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said it’s clear: Abstinence programs work. 

“We want funding to go to programs that prove to be the most healthy for young people,” she said, “not programs that encourage kids to be sexually active and therefore cause them all kinds of harm.” 

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