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Speaking Out About Sex Ed
by Julie Sabatier, 11.25.03
"We know the best way to protect ourselves is not to have sex. But we also need to know about contraception." |
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At the beginning of this year, I started to notice some changes in the advertising landscape on my way to work. Joining the oversized ads for beer, cars, and cell phones that tower over the highway are billboards bearing slogans such as "Abstinence works every time." One of these billboards displays smiling children dressed as astronauts, doctors, teachers, and firefighters and reads: "Imagine your future if you wait to have sex."
These signs and slogans are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) strategic plan for 2003-2008, which aims to "reduce the proportion of adolescents engaged in sexual activity, the proportion of persons engaged in unsafe sexual behaviors, and unintended pregnancies." In other words, HHS wants to continue the downward trend in teen pregnancy rates by telling teens to abstain from sex until marriage. The words "birth control" or "contraception" do not appear anywhere on the billboards or in the HHS strategic plan.
Promoting Responsible Choices
So what's the problem with abstinence? There is none. In fact, it's the only 100 percent effective way to prevent unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. But studies have shown that teaching abstinence alone is not effective. Only comprehensive, medically accurate sex education — which includes information on both abstinence and birth control — has been proven to prevent pregnancy and infection. However, one-third of American high schools have sex education programs that teach abstinence until marriage as the only way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections — but provide no information about birth control or preventing infections.
The truth is, some teens do choose to have sex, and they need to know how to protect themselves against pregnancy and infection. If teens don't get this kind of education in schools, they may get incorrect information elsewhere, from uninformed friends or unreliable media sources. It's also important to note that the "abstinence-only until marriage" platform excludes lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, who, by law, do not have the option to marry same-sex partners in 49 out of 50 states. (It also excludes all unmarried adults!)
Proponents of abstinence-only education often argue that these programs are more sensible than comprehensive ones because, as Leslie Unruh of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse told ABCNEWS, "... when children are given comprehensive sex ed and then abstinence also, it's a mixed message and confuses them."
This kind of argument assumes that teens are too stupid to figure out the difference between giving someone a parachute and telling her or him to jump. "We get it. We know the best way to protect ourselves is not to have sex. But we also need to know about contraception. It seems to us that adults waste an awful lot of time arguing about all of this," said an unnamed teenager in Talking Back: What Teens Want Adults to Know About Teen Pregnancy, a document published by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a nonprofit organization founded in 1996, promotes abstinence for teens, encouraging them to wait until they are out of high school before having sex. However, as Sarah Brown, the campaign's director put it, "For teens, abstinence is better than contraception, but contraception is better than pregnancy."
Preventing teen pregnancy does not necessarily mean preventing sex — it means promoting healthy, safe, and smart decisions about sex, whether that means abstaining altogether, engaging in various kinds of safer sex play other than intercourse, or using protection when having intercourse. Comprehensive sex education empowers teens by teaching them that they have choices.
Taking Action
If you are not happy with your school's sex education program, you can start a campaign to change it, as some teens in Lubbock, TX, did last year. Led by 17-year-old Corey Nichols, several teens in this town created a community forum to talk about sex because they felt that the issue wasn't being discussed thoroughly enough in their classrooms.
If you're not ready to take on the school board just yet, you can learn more by checking out these Web sites:
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