No-Sex Education
This chapter is pretty self evident, the history of sex-education in America. The gradual shift over the last few decades from comprehensive sex education to abstinence-only and abstinence-plus education. It also outlines some of the problems with that, such as abstinence-only students being more likely to have unprotected sex.
A sadder part of this chapter, most of which I haven’t included, is the way moderates and the Left allowed the Right to gain more and more power over sex education. This was mainly because they were exhausted by constant attacks from the Right, allegations of pedophilia for instance. As people got more tired, and the flow of money shifted, there was less and less resistance to the conservative agenda. The end result has, of course, been harmful to kids.
In 1981, the freshman Alabama Republican Senator, a Baptist with the apocalyptic given name of Jeremiah, came up with a way to wrestle down teen pregnancy at the same time as vanquishing what he believed were twin moral scourges: teen sex and abortion. In place of several successful national programs that provided birth-control services and counselling to young women, Jeremiah Denton’s Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) proposed to stop teen sex by deploying nothing more than propaganda. AFLA would fund school and community programs “to promote self-discipline and other prudent approaches” to adolescent sex.
Sex ed was a political backwater to begin with; hardly anyone paid attention to it. Unlike its opponents, sex ed’s champions had a couple of national organizations but no other national movement, no coherent cultural-political agenda. As the sociologist Janice Irvine points out, neither feminists nor the political Left rallied to the cause; gays and lesbians joined the fray only in the 1990s, when attacks began to focus more directly and hostilely on them. The most progressive and politically savvy sex educators were working outside the public schools, so they had limited say in public policy and little direct effect on the majority of kids. At the grass roots, the visible forces against sex ed were usually miniscule, often one or two ferocious parents and their pastor. But local defenses were feebler, and the already puny garrisons of comprehensive sexuality education began to fall.
Twenty years later, the Right has all but won the sex-education wars. In 1997, the U.S. Congress committed a quarter billion dollars over five years’ time to finance more education in chastity, whose name had been replaced by the less churchly, more twelve-steppish abstinence. As part of the omnibus “welfare reform bill,” the government’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau extended grants to the states for programs whose “exclusive purpose [is] teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity.” In a country where only one in ten school-children receives more than forty hours of sex ed in any year,3 the regulations prohibit funded organizations from instructing kids about contraception or condoms except in terms of their failures. In a country where 90 percent of adults have sex before marriage and as many as 10 percent are gay or lesbian, the law underwrites one message and one message only: that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” Nonmarital sex, educators are required to tell children, “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”4
At first, there was a flurry of opposition to the welfare regulations. But every state eventually took the money. In many states, the dollars went largely to curriculum developers outside schools. But over the decade, right-wing propaganda and political action had been pushing public-school sex ed steadily toward chastity. Now that was compounded by the financial pull from Washington, and the process lurched forward. By 1999, fully a third of public school districts were using abstinence-only curricula in their classrooms.5 Of a nationwide sample of sex-ed instructors surveyed by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 41 percent cited abstinence as the most important message they wanted to convey to their students, compared with 25 percent in 1988. In the same dozen years the number of of sex-ed teachers who talked exclusively about abstinence in their classes rose elevenfold, to nearly 25 percent from only 2 percent. The study’s findings suggested “deep declines . . . in teacher support for coverage of many topics including birth control, abortion, information on obtaining contraceptive and STD services, and sexual orientation,” commented one report. “More over, the proposition of teachers actually addressing these topics also declined.”6
Parents, when asked, overwhelmingly rise in favor of sexuality education covering a wide variety of topics, including contraception and even abortion and sexual orientation.7 But, no doubt motivated by fear of AIDS, they like abstinence too. Of a national sample of parents surveyed in 2000 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 98 percent put HIV/AIDS prevention on the list of desired topics to be taught in school, with abstinence following close behind, at 97 percent.
First, around the globe, most people begin to engage in sexual intercourse or its equivalent homosexual intimacies during their teen years. And second, there is no evidence that lessons in abstinence, either alone or accompanied by fuller complement of sexuality and health information, actually holds teens off from sexual intercourse for more than a matter of months.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that American adults would preach to children to not have sex. The majority of them always have. But the logic that it is necessary and good to offer abstinence as one of several “options”—the rational given by the abstinence-plus (formerly comprehensive) educators—is more apparent than real … Abstinence education is not practical. It is ideological.
Indeed, the 1970s were a banner decade for youthful sexual autonomy, not only in the streets and rock clubs, but also in schools, clinics, and the highest courts of the land. Following Roe v. Wade (1973), liberals and feminists won a steady series of court cases guaranteeing poor and teenage women’s rights to birth control information and services, and Washington and the states responded by establishing major programs to provide them. This proliferation of clinics reporting to the government had an unexpected result … suddenly, there were mountains of data on teen sex, contraception, and pregnancy and its termination—information previously only available about the poor. The liberal family-planning establishment thought it could deploy the new data to gain support for its cause. So did the Right.
Then in 1976, some statistics dripping with propaganda potential arrived. The pro-family-planning Alan Guttmacher Institute released Eleven Million Teenagers, a report announcing a national “epidemic” of teen pregnancy. “Unwanted pregnancy is happening to our young women, not only among the poor and minority groups, but in all socioeconomic groups,” the president told Congress. “If I had a daughter, I would say [it was happening] to ‘our’ daughters.”18
This was not accurate. First of all, unwanted pregnancy, for the most part, was not happening to the daughters of demographers, doctors, and Washington bureaucrats. Now as then, more than 80 percent of America’s teen mothers come from poor households.20 And even among these young women, there was no epidemic. Eleven million referred to the number of people under eighteen who had had intercourse at least once. Teen pregnancies actually numbered fewer than a million a year, and of those teen mothers, six in ten were legal adults, eighteen to nineteen years old.21 Yes, unmarried teens were having more sex in the 1970s than they’d had in the decades before.22 But teen motherhood had hit its twentieth-century zenith in the mid 1950s, when one in ten girls between fifteen and nineteen years of age gave birth. Since then, the rate has steadily dropped.23
This bankrolling—and the substitution of federal funds for contraception with dollars for chastity—was anything but surreptitious. AFLA “was written expressly for the purpose of diverting [federal] money that would otherwise go to Planned Parenthood into groups with traditional values,” a Conservative Digest writer reported. “That noble purpose has certainly been fulfilled here. If it hadn’t been for the seed money provided by the government, ‘Sex Respect’ might still be just an idea sitting in a graduate student’s thesis.”31 Said former SIECUS spokesman Daniel Daley in 1997, “In those first years of AFLA, this money went directly from the government to Christian fundamentalist groups, who built the infrastructure of the organizations that are the most vehement opponents of comprehensive sexuality education today.” Also born during that time was the discourse of teen sex that shapes policy to this day.
In his July 1981 committee report on S. 1090, Denton quoted the statistics promulgated by the Guttmacher Institute32 (he was probably unaware the organization was named for one of history’s great champions of abortion rights). The senator declared that the government should address the “needs of pregnant adolescents” and proposed a prescription that the entire family-planning profession could applaud: more prevention.
But prevention of what? Poverty? Teen pregnancy? Unwed motherhood? Abortion? Denton claimed he could eradicate all of the above by preventing what he saw as the cause of them all: teen sex. In what would become the central maneuver in the conservative rhetoric of teen sexuality over the next decades, Denton collapsed four separate events—sex, pregnancy, birth, and abortion—into one “widespread problem.” He attributed “serious medical, social, and economic consequences” to all four and then wrapped them into one whopper: “the problem of premarital adolescent sexual relations.”33
This “problem” had been exacerbated by a decade of social policy, which he and Hatch summed up in a letter to the New York Times as “$1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money [spent] on “family planning.’”34 Contraception and abortion, they reasoned, had led to teen sex, which led to pregnancy. The logical sleight of hand was impressive: contraception and abortion caused teen pregnancy.
But the real trouble, as the sponsors saw it, was not just adolescent sex. It was sex behind Mom and Dad’s backs. “The deep pocket of government has funded this intervention between parents and their children in schools and clinics for 10 years,” wrote Hatch and Denton. “[I]t is little wonder that problems of adolescent sexual activity grow worse.”35 In other words, clinics that offered confidential services to adolescents, as the Supreme Court had ordered in 1977, were ripping the family apart by promoting children’s liberation at the expense of a newly articulated subset of family values, “parental rights.” (Later, in conservative parlance, “parents” would become “families,” implying a harmonious and cooperative unit without gender or generational conflict.)
Family Planning had long been a euphemism for contraception, which was a trope of the modern, conscious, technologically enhanced sexual activity. To family planners, prevention had meant the prevention of unplanned pregnancy. Now prevention was the prevention of sex, and it would be accomplished not by the Pill but by diatribe and ideology. AFLA installed sex education under the aegis of “family life.” And in the ideal family, parents kept their children safe by denying their sexuality and their autonomy, and children could feel safe by accepting the limits of childhood.
501 (b): Abstinence Education, of the Social Security Act of 1997. To receive money from Washington, states would have to match each federal dollar with two from their own coffers that might otherwise go to more catholic programs. Not only was the federal government encouraging abstinence-only; it was discouraging everything else.
In one way, the wide support for abstinence makes sense. Americans are still convinced teen pregnancy is pandemic, and in time of sex-borne death, containing the exchange of adolescent body fluids is an attractive notion to parents, educators, and even to kids themselves.
In another way, however, it is senseless and for the simplest of reasons: Comprehensive, nonabstinence sex education works. And abstinence education does not. In many European countries, where they have as much sex as in America, sex ed starts in the earliest grades. It is informed by a no-nonsense, even enthusiastic, attitude toward the sexual; it is explicit; and it doesn’t teach abstinence. Rates of unwanted teen pregnancy, abortion, and AIDS in every Western European country are a fraction of our own; the average age of first intercourse is about the same in the United States.43
Abstinence programs, on the other hand, do not change students’ attitudes for long, and they change behavior hardly a whit. By 1997, six studies had been published in the scientific literature showing that these classes did not accomplish their goal: to get kids to delay intercourse.44 In one case, male students enrolled in a chastity-only course actually had more sex than those in the control group.45 Following the implementation of the welfare rules, a study of 659 American Philadelphia sixth- and seventh-graders, published in the Journal of The American Medical Association, returned the same verdict. A year after the classes, the kids who had undergone an abstinence-only program were engaging in intercourse in the same numbers (about a fifth) as kids who had received lessons stressing condom use, with the dangerous difference that the first group hadn’t been taught anything about safe sex.46 … A consensus statement on AIDS prevention by the National Institutes of Health delivered an even more damning indictment: abstinence-only education was potentially lethal. The “approach places policy in direct conflict with science and ignores overwhelming evidence that other programs would be effective,” concluded the group, whose members included many of the country’s top AIDS experts. “[A]bstinence-only programs cannot be justified if the face of effective programs given the fact that we face an international emergency in the AIDS epidemic.”48
If abstinence offers kids the freedom from growing up, it tenders to parents an equally impossible corollary, freedom from watching their kids grow up. That promise is fully consonant with what conservative parents want for themselves and their children, and sometimes it is fulfilled, at least temporarily.
For more moderate or liberal parents, the wish for such a “freedom” is more conflicted. The majority of American adults champion sexuality education at school: the very first Gallup Poll, in 1943, found 68 percent of parents favoring it,63 and even the heaviest right-wing fire in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t manage to blast away the base of that support, which consistently bested 80 percent.64 But parents also embrace abstinence. Most concede that their kids will probably have sex in their teens, in other words, but surveying the dangers their children face, also wish they wouldn’t.
Abstinence-plus speaks to these mothers and fathers. The plus addresses the rational concession that sex will happen. But the abstinence connects powerfully to that deep parental wish to protect and “keep” their children by guarding their childhood. In this sense, abstinence is about reversing, or at least holding back, the coming of age, which for parents is a story of loss, as their children establish passionate connections with people and values outside the family.
In some advertising copy in 1997, SIECUS president Debra Haffner criticized abstinence-only education as a kid of child neglect. “When we treat sexuality as adults-only,” she said, “we abandon teenagers to learn about their sexuality on their own, by trial and error.” Her point was correct and crucial: accurate, positively communicated, and effectively transmitted information about sexuality makes the going happier, easier, and far less dangerous for young people. Abstinence-only education falsely promises parents it can eliminate the awfulness of watching children try and fail (because by the time they get to sex, they will be adults and able to handle it). But comprehensive education may also encourage a similarly unrealistic, but profoundly held, parental hope: that teen sexuality can be rational, protected, and heartbreak-free.
“The nature of teen romance is that it is tortured, and then it ends,” the writer and former sex educator Sharon Thompson commented, laughing sympathetically. Thompson sees not only the avoidance of romantic pitfalls but also the knocks themselves as potentially “educative.” She advocates “romance education,” but she also knows that adults can’t save their kids from le chagrin d’amour. Contrary to the implication in Haffner’s plea that adults not “abandon” teens to sexual trial and error, the fact is that sexual relationships are by definition what teenagers do on their own, and the only way for teens to learn about them is to try—which usually means failing, too. “Maturity,” including sexual maturity, cannot be attained without practice, and as in sex as skiing, practice is risky.
Parent education, even well-trained parent education, affirms the new orthodoxy that parents possess the sex-educational will and competence whose very absence mobilized the founders of sex instruction nearly a century ago.
These recent moves toward parent education bespeak a contradiction inside sex ed. One the one hand, they are consistent with the historical conservatism of the discipline, which has always consigned sex to marriage and aimed to strengthen parental authority. On the other, they represent a retreat from the critique of the family implicit in school-based sexuality education, which endorses the sexual-intellectual autonomy of children and suggests that the family, with its hierarchal structure, its neuroses, ignorance, and taboos, is not the best sex educator after all.
After rising steadily from 1970, the rate of teen intercourse in America dropped a smidgen in the 1990s,66 while the teen pregnancy and birth rates slid, by 17 percent and 19 percent, respectively (these were still the highest in the developed world, about comparable with Bulgaria).67 Unsurprisingly, many link these two facts to a spreading conservatism among kids, including the embrace of virginity. The renewed popularity of virginity has been attributed to abstinence education.
Examined more closely, however, the casual relationship between abstinence education and a reduction in teen pregnancy is, at best, small. A major analysis by the Alan Guttmacher Institute attributes about a fourth of the delayed intercourse but three-quarters to improved contraceptive use among sexually experienced teenagers.68 In Europe, where kids have as much sex as they do in America, teen pregnancy rates are about a fourth as high as ours.69
In the Netherlands, where celibacy is not taught, contraception is free throughout the national health service, and condoms are widely available in vending machines, “teenage pregnancy seems virtually eliminated as a health and social problem,” according to Dr. Simone Buitendijk of the Dutch Institute for Applied Scientific Research. Fewer than 1 percent of Dutch fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds become pregnant each year.70
There may even be an inverse relationship between abstinence education and declining rates of pregnancy. For one thing, because many abstinence programs teach kids that refraining from intercourse is the only surefire way to prevent pregnancy and vastly exaggerate the failures of contraception and condoms, students get the impression that birth control and STD prevention methods don’t work. So they shrug off using them or don’t know how to use them. Contraception education, on the other hand, works: teens who learn about birth control are more likely to protect themselves if they have intercourse than kids who are not given such lessons.72
Some formerly committed teachers have lined up at the abstinence-only trough, ethics be damned. A Minneapolis sex-ed consultant told me boldly one morning in 1998 that “we’ve been doing sex ed wrong for the past fifteen years.” How so? “We say sex is bad for kids, and it isn’t.” The interview was rushed, because that afternoon she was scheduled to do a teacher-training workshop—on the city’s new abstinence-only curricula. Huh? “It helps me get more business in town,” the educator explained. If a woman with these beliefs was now concealing them in order to preach the gospel of chastity to young teachers, I despaired of the next generation of sex educators, not to mention their students.
The Right won, but the mainstream let it. Comprehensive sex educators has the upper hand in the 1970s, and starting in the 1980s, they allowed their enemies to seize more and more territory, until the Right controlled the law, the language, and the cultural consensus. Sad as the comprehensive sex educators’ story is, they must share some of the blame for what the abstinence-only movement has wrought in the lives of the young. Commenting on its failure to defend explicit sexuality education during an avalanche of new HIV infection among teenagers, Sharon Thompson said, “We will look back at this time and indict the sex-education community as criminal. It’s like being in a nuclear power plant that has a leak, and not telling anybody.”
3 – Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (New York: Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S., 1994), 1.
4 – Social Security Act, Title V, Section 510 (1997), Maternal and Child Health Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
5 – David J. Landry, Lisa Kaeser, and Cory L. Richards, “Abstinence Promotion and the Provision of Information about Contraception in Public School District Sexuality Education Policies,” Family Planning Perspectives 31, no. 6 (November/December 1999): 280-86; Kaiser Family Foundation, “Most Secondary Schools Take a More Comprehensive Approach to Sex Education,” press release, December 14, 1999.
6 – “Changes in Sexuality Education from 1988-1999,” SEICUS, SHOP Talk Bulletin 5, no. 16 (October 13, 2000).
7 – Diana Jean Schemo, “Survey Finds Parents Favor More Detailed Sex Education,” New York Times, October 4, 2000, A1.
18 – Guttmacher Report, quoted in Constance A. Nathanson, Dangerous Passages: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 47.
20 – Alan Guttmacher Institute, Sex and America’s Teenagers (New York: the institute, 1994), 58; Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 106-8; Arline T. Geronimus and Sanders Korenman, “The Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1992): 1187-214; William Marsigho and Constance L. Shehan, “Adolescent Males’ Abortion Attitudes: Data from a National Survey,” Family Planning Perspectives 25 (July/August 1993): 163.
21 – Alan Guttmacher Institute, Eleven Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States (New York: Planned Parenthood Federation on America, 1976), 9-11.
22 – Nathanson, Dangerous Passages, 60.
23 – Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 8.
31 – Teaching Fear: The Religious Right’s Campaign Against Sexuality Education (Washington, D.C.: People for the American Way, June 1994), 11.
32 – The statistics available at the time from the institute were that 780,000 (39 percent) of 2 million fourteen-year-old girls would have at least one pregnancy in their teens; 420,000 would give birth; 300,000 would have abortions.
33 – U.S. Senate Jeremiah Denton, Adolescent Family Life, S. Rept. 97-161, July 8, 1981, 2.
34 and 35 – “To Attack the Problem of Adolescent Sexuality,” New York Times, June 15, 1981, A22.
43 – “Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe & the U.S.—Why the Difference?” 2d ed., Advocates for Youth report, Washington, D.C., 2000.
44 – Douglas Kirby, “No Easy Answers: Research Findings on Programs to Reduce Teen Pregnancy,” National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy report, Washington, D.C., 1997.
45 – Marl W. Roosa and F. Scott Christopher, “An Evaluation of an Abstience-Only Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program: Is ‘Just Say No’ Enough?” Family Relations 39 (January 1990): 68-72.
46 – John B. Jemmott III, Loretta Sweet Jemmott, and Geoffrey T. Fong, “Abstinence and Safer Sex: HIV Risk-Reduction Interventions for African American Adolescents,” Journal of the American Medical Association 279, no. 19 (May 20, 1998): 1529-36.
48 – National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement, Interventions to Prevent HIV Risk Behaviors, February 11-13, 1997 (Bethesda, Md.: NIH), 15.
63 – Scales and Roper, “Challenges to Sexuality Education,” 70.
64 – Irving R. Dickman, Winning the Battle for Sex Education, pamphlet (New York: SIECUS, 1982); Debra Haffner and Diane de Mauro, Winning the Battle: Developing Support for Sexuality and HIV/AIDS Education, pamphlet (New York: SIECUS, 1991); Teaching Fear.
66 – “Trends in Sexual Risk Behaviors among High School Students—U.S. 1991-97,” Morbidity And Mortality Weekly Report 47 (September 18, 1998): 749-52; “Most Adults in the United States Who Have Multiple Sexual Partners Do Not Use Condoms Consistently,” Family Planning Perspectives 26 (January/February 1994): 42-43.
67 – Susheela Singh and Jacqueline E. Darroch, “Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing: Levels and Trends in Developed Countries,” Family Planning Perspectives 32 (2000): 14-23; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center For Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Report 4, no. 4 (2001).
68 – “Why is Teenage Pregnancy Declining? The Roles of Abstinence, Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use,” Alan Guttmacher Institute Occasional Report 1999; With One Voice: American Adults and Teens Sound Off about Teen Pregnancy (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2001).
70 – “Teen Pregnancy ‘Virtually Eliminated’ in the Netherlands,” Reuters Health/London news story (accessed through Medscape), March 2, 2001.
72 – J. Mauldon and K. Luker, “The Effects of Contraceptive Education on Method Use at First Intercourse,” Family Planning Perspectives (January/February 1996): 19.
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