Putting the “Ed” Back in Sex Education
September 21, 2007 9:08:00
By Ms. Didi
Web Correspondent
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota
Like most of you, dear cyber-readers, I support the teaching of comprehensive sex education in schools. All of the nonsense from our delightful Governor, our dear President, not to mention from the latter’s positively medieval Surgeon General nominees, might lead you to believe that we are a tiny minority, awash in a sea of people afraid to use accurate medical terminology to describe their own body parts and convinced that American teenagers won’t have sex if we don’t tell them about it. Not so! Two recent studies showed 73% of American parents (U.S. Dept. of Health, 2007) and 77% of Minnesota parents want schools to teach their teens about contraception in addition to abstinence (MN Dept. of Health, 2004). When it comes to teaching kids about sex, Minnesota parents want support. Nevertheless, Governor Tim Pawlenty has decided they can’t have it. The recently proposed Comprehensive Sexuality and Family Life Education Programs bill passed in both the state senate and the house. It died when only when the governor threatened to veto the Omnibus Education Bill if the “comp sex” provisions remained intact. In shutting down the “Comp Sex” bill, Pawlenty seems to have lost sight of two important concepts: that pesky “government by the people” idea; and the notion of sex education as actual education.
We all know that representing the people is a tough job in a pluralistic society. America has dealt with this challenge most successfully when it attempts to speak for the majority while protecting the minority. Minnesota’s “Comp Sex” bill managed to respect the needs of all. It proposed statewide, scientifically sound sex education standards, while it allowed for parents who disagree with comprehensive sex education to exempt their teens from the program. Hence, it would provides the majority of teens with the comprehensive sex education their parents want for them, while still giving the “abstinence-only-sex-ed.-at-home” minority an escape clause.
Minnesota’s “Comp Sex Ed” bill also marks the return us to another tradition the governor has eschewed—the educational excellence that has long been the hallmark of our public schools. The bill proposes an abstinence-first approach, taught alongside medically accurate information. The latter became an issue last year when a congressional report on federally-funded abstinence-only programs, “…concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. [1]” Some of these curricula claimed that HIV could be spread by tears or sweat, or offered up a man’s need for "admiration" and a woman's need for "financial support” as scientific facts [2]. While the report did not specifically mention Minnesota’s abstinence-only programs, it did cast a pall of suspicion over the generally accuracy of this approach [3]. The Comp Sex Ed bill would put that suspicion to rest by insuring that proven medical facts guide our teens’ education.
Even if we cast aside traditions like representative government and the pursuit of educational excellence (they’re such a pain, really), the bottom line is that comprehensive sexual education programs are more effective than abstinence-only programs. A 2004 Minnesota Health Department evaluation of MN ENABL (MN Education Now & Babies Later) revealed that the rate of teen sex had gone up since the program’s 1998 introduction. Nationally, a reported 46% of teens, ages 15-19, have had sex at least one time [4]. The U.S. Health Department’s What Works report, released in April of this year, indicates that teens “enrolled in the abstinence-only programs were no more likely than those not in the programs to delay sexual initiation, have fewer sexual partners, or abstain from sex entirely (U.S. Department of Health, 2007). Maureen Lyon of the American Psychological Association described the survey results that lead the APA to declare a resolution in support of comprehensive sex education,
Both comprehensive sex education and abstinence only programs delay the onset of sexual activity. However, only comprehensive sex education is effective in protecting adolescents
from pregnancy and sexually transmitted illnesses at first intercourse and during later sexual
activity. In contrast, scientifically sound studies of abstinence only programs show an
unintended consequence of unprotected sex at first intercourse and during later sexual activity. In this way, abstinence only programs increase the risk of these adolescents for pregnancy and sexually transmitted illnesses, including HIV/AIDS." (APA, 2005)
Well said, Maureen.
Yes, despite what Governor Pawlenty, President Bush and others would like us to think, we’re not alone in wanting comprehensive sex education in our schools. Most of the parents we know want it, too. Join the Planned Parenthood Action Network today and find out what you can do to put the education about sex back in sex education.
Footnotes:
1 “Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says,” Washington Post, Dec. 2, 2004
2 Ibid.
3 Report- U.S. House Committee on Government Reform, July 2006
4 “In Brief: Facts on American Teen’s Sexual and Reproductive Health,” Guttmacher Institute, September 2006.
