MOST OF US, being long past the age where sex education might be of some value, may be living in a bit of a dream world.
There’s no question but that a lot of parents prefer to avoid “the birds and bees” discussions with their offspring and prefer to rely on the public schools — or the neighborhood kids — to relay the basics.
Some may have noticed news reports that the Clarke County Board of Education, by an 8-to-1 vote, recently voted to end abstinence-only sex education and switch to one that includes mention of contraception and the birth-control pill.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the value of abstinence and purity until marriage, given the negative consequences inherently possible with any other approach. There’s something very, very wrong with excluding — censoring — knowledge about self-protection should hormones conquer all, as they often do.
An Athens newspaper report on the fairly controversial issue included the statement that Clarke would now be “the first school district in the state to teach about contraception and the pill.”
Gulp and gasp!
WELL, MAYBE NOT. An internet check shows there are actually 15 states where only one way to avoid getting pregnant (Don’t do it!) is mentioned. Most of those states also rank in the top ones for percentage of teen-agers having babies.
Georgia is currently No. 10, actually an “improvement” from the past but not because of anything good. Seems Georgia has gotten better because some other states have gotten worse.
The current teen birth rate in Georgia is 54.2 percent. The national rate is 41.9 percent.
And all this underlies the state’s high rate of poverty. As Athens pointed out, teen mothers are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be unmarried, more likely to have children with expensive health problems because of a lack of adequate prenatal care.
There’s nothing wrong with providing information about abstinence, even in a most-positive manner. There’s something wrong, even dangerous, about not offering instruction in self-protection at the same time. It’s sort of like sending soldiers off to war without giving them any body armor.
Many eons ago, our own high-school sex-education class, provided by a state far more politically conservative than even Georgia, included information about contraception. It also spent a lot of time showing us old military World War II training films about the dangers of fraternizing with civilians. Some of the pictures beat anything seen on the “CSI” TV shows.
One would have assumed that such fundamental instructional information would have been the norm today, not nonexistent in Georgia until this moment.
THIS GAME of make-believe regarding sex goes a long way in explaining some national statistics dating from a 2002 study.
One-third of teens had not received any formal instruction about contraception.
More than one in five adolescents of both sexes received abstinence education without any instruction about birth control.
Less than two-thirds of sexually experienced female teens had been instructed about contraception before they first had sex, compared with an about 10 percent larger number a few years earlier, before abstinence-only became all the rage.
This is made all the more remarkable because known contraceptive efforts date back in history to about 1000 B.C.
The first U.S. newspaper ad for a condom similar to those sold today appeared in 1861. The rhythm method was introduced in the early 20th century. Birth-control pills appeared on the market in the early 1960s.
The failure rate of abstinence-only would appear to be far higher than any of those contraceptive methods, given the known outcomes.
This goes a long way in explaining the factual, rather than philosophical, reasons for President Obama, in one of his first actions in office, pulling federal funding support from purely abstinence-only education.
Which, of course, does not ban it from being one of the ways suggested to blunt Cupid’s arrows.
THERE’S MORE — far more — than “sex” involved in this issue. Reducing poverty, cutting down on the public support that too-young and/or unmarried mothers regularly need to receive, is a taxpayer issue. Nobody’s going to allow a child to go hungry, be untreated for their illness, denied schooling. The less the Good Samaritan taxpayer is called upon to step forward, the more likely the amounts extracted from him or her under protest will be able to be reduced without human harm.
It would be a welcome sight to see the Floyd County and Rome school boards imitate the action of Clarke County. Not teaching about contraception and birth control is pretty much like discussing the invention of the wheel and never getting around to the internal combustion engine.
Besides, how are today’s Georgia teens to understand today’s television fare, and how their idols never seem to get pregnant when they don’t abstain, without letting them in on this “secret”?
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