To prevent teen pregnancy, should students be taught only the merits of abstaining from sex? Or should they also learn about contraception, just in case? Believers on both sides are facing off again, after a government announcement in early December that teen birthrates rose 3 percent last year following a 14-year decline. Some public-health experts blame increasingly popular sex-ed programs that preach abstinence only and keep kids in the dark about other pregnancy-prevention methods: A study published recently in the American Journal of Public Health attributed most of the 14-year birthrate drop to wider contraceptive use. “Abstinence-only programs are ideology driven,” says Marilyn Keefe, director of reproductive health and rights at the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, “and not a good use of our public-health dollars.”
Abstinence advocates, meanwhile, are crying foul, saying the uptick in pregnancies is a sign that a stronger pitch for delaying sex is needed. “Any kind of assertion of blame is a disingenuous attempt to turn these statistics into a political agenda,” insists Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. Even with more schools teaching the benefits of abstinence, she says, most still emphasize contraceptive techniques over waiting. Huber believes the purist approach is bound to lead to less sex among teens.
I’m not one to blame sex ed for the increase in teen pregnancies over the past 40 years, but it’s clear that approach has not worked. Personally, I don’t think anything in the schools is going to work, since 1.) kids learn that sort of thing at home,for good or ill, not at school, and 2.) get real – advertising and entertainment (how many hours of TV do kids watch per day?) is based on sex. By the age of 15, how many times has a kid seen two people look into each other’s eyes, fall into each other’s arms, then head for the bedroom?
As a society, we should learn two things:
– it’s the home, not the school, that determines a child’s path
– pregnancy is caused by sex. You would think that a society that effectively endorses fornication could figure that out.
[blockquote] Abstinence-only programs are ideology driven,” says Marilyn Keefe, director of reproductive health and rights at the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, “and not a good use of our public-health dollars.” [/blockquote]
Before my older daughter took sex education in High School, I went to the school nurse, and reviewed the curriculum. It was described as “Abstinence Plus” and it really did not contain any content that I found objectionable. There were the unfortunate references to anal sex, but AIDS necessitates that subject be broached. The content was otherwise fine. But it was not complete.
What was missing was (for lack of a better term) a doctrine of sex. There was no content on the purpose of sex. No guidance was provided on the crucial questions of with whom, or when, or (most important) why. And this had practical implications for their “Abstinence Plus” program. I asked the nurse how she would answer a student who asked “Abstinence until when?” She said they could not answer that question. This is sex education without moral content – without “ideology” to use their term.
Except these questions cannot be avoided. Sex cannot be taught without moral content, because it is inherently a moral act. To teach sex without moral content is in reality to teach a default moral context of consequentialism. It implicitly teaches a self-centered morality that sex is primarily for individual pleasure and fulfillment. It implicitly breaks all the connections between sex and children and marriage. It gives adult sanction to teenage sexual behavior, and therefore empowers children to make adult decisions of enormous magnitude at a time when they are ill-equipped to make sound moral decisions. And legally, their parents are isolated from all these decisions. Only when the bad decisions come home to roost are parents drawn back in, and then only to pick up the pieces.
And all of this very deliberate. This is the counter-ideology that is being taught, and for a very specific purpose – to separate children from the world view of their parents. They say “Your parents are wrong about sex, and a lot of other things. Listen to us instead.” And to teenagers who crave adult permission to have sex, it is a very powerful message indeed.
carl
As both a physician and a mother of four I have written about this topic several times including here and here. Carl has touched on the crux of the problem. What we really want to teach our children is not abstinence, but the virtue of chastity. However, when the school system attempts a “morally neutral” program, chastity is watered down to a “just say no” abstinence program. Teaching abstinence separated from the moral context of chastity is not near as convincing. These lessons need to be taught at home within the context of a family’s faith and values. Teaching them at school is a wholly inadequate substitute.
#3 Point on. Teaching abstinence is like trying to prove a negative. It is far more useful to show how licentious behavior produces negative lifetime results than to show the spurious connection between abstinence and virtue.
The great monastics were most sucessful in motivating monks to be virtuous, and thereby encourage celibacy, rather than the converse. Trying to make unvirtuous teenagers abstinent is like pretending that a roof will never leak.
Hooray #3! You have it. Sadly, with the direction of our country toward political “morally neutral” correctness…it’ll only get worse.
bl