Published September, 2007

Statement on End of Abstinence-Only Program Funding, Commissioner Richard F. Daines, New York State Department of Health (2007)

On September 20, 2007, New York State Department of Health Commissioner Richard Daines announced that New York would no longer accept federal abstinence-only-until-marriage funding. Since 1998, New York has received $3.5 million a year for abstinence-only programming, and the state had spent an additional $2.6 million annually on it over the past decade. That money will now be used for actual sex education programming, according to Commissioner Daines. For more information on abstinence-only programming in New York, see the September 2007 report of the New York Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Rights Project, Financing Ignorance: A Report on Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Funding in New York.