THEY call it the “hearts-and-libidos” campaign.

Sherry Smith, a 50-year-old former nurse from Pasadena, a leafy suburb of Los Angeles, is one of thousands of teachers across America who are promoting a new — or very old, depending on how you look at it — kind of sex education: condoms are “not what they’re cracked up to be”; mutual masturbation can cause pregnancy; and girls who have sex run the risk of suicide.

Much to the despair of liberal Americans, the statistics suggest that these so-called “abstinence-only” campaigns are working. According to the US Department of Health, the birth rate for American females between 15 and 19 years old was 43 per 1,000 in 2002 — less than half the rate of 101.1 in 1995. Even teenage boys seem to be less keen: only 31 per cent had sex in 2001, down from 43 per cent in 1995, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics.

Critics, led by the Californian Congressman Henry Waxman, say that more than 80 per cent of the abstinence-only curriculum contains “false, misleading or distorted information”.

In a report on the subject, Mr Waxman’s staff analysed the content of abstinence pamphlets with titles such as Sex Can Wait and Managing Pleasures Before Marriage. One claimed falsely that up to 10 per cent of women who had legal abortions would become sterile; another taught that women “need financial support”, while men need “admiration”.

In many instances, the report says, religious views were presented as fact. Mr Waxman’s supporters say that abstinence programmes have set back HIV-education efforts by decades, because they suggest that unprotected sex is only marginally less risky than sex with a condom.

Mrs Smith, who describes herself as a “secondary virgin” who failed to abstain from sex when she was young, is delighted with the trend towards “just say no” sex education campaigns. “These abstinence-only programmes really took off in the mid-1990s, and look what’s happened now,” says Mrs Smith, who converted to Roman Catholicism with her husband 20 years ago after working as a nurse with Aids patients.

“When you empower the kids, and tell them they don’t have to have sex, it’s a real eye-opener for them. Because what the teenagers see on television — Ally McBeal having sex with a complete stranger in a car wash, for example — is telling them otherwise.”

Sex, Love & Choices, the organisation for which Mrs Smith is medical services director, is funded by the Right to Life League, a non-profit organisation. It now hopes that California will loosen its restrictions on federal fun- ding of abstinence-only sex programmes. That will allow Mrs Smith to claim some of the $170 million (£88 million) pledged by President Bush to such initiatives for this year, double the amount given in 2001 when he came into office. The money is available only where local government is willing to accept it.

So the decision will ultimately rest with the Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger — not an obvious role model for teenage chastity.

Mrs Smith says that she would love to see the Bush Administration “completely trash that comprehensive sex education programme”, which she says overplays the condom’s effectiveness at preventing sexually transmitted diseases. She believes that her most powerful weapon is her teachers. “They’re young and good- looking, happy and healthy,” she says.

“It’s not like they’re miserable and 300lb.”

She is also keen to emphasise that she is no prude.

“We’re all married in this office,” she says, “and we’re having plenty of sex.”

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