AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2007 > October > 27
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Are Schools encouraging students to have sex?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Have you walked through the halls of your local middle school lately? It’s pretty shocking-Teachers piping Usher’s “Seduction” through the sound system, filling classrooms with lit candles, massage oil and giant pillows…
Alright, I’ll stop. School-sanctioned sexual activity isn’t very funny, and that goes double for pregnant eleven-year-olds.
You want to hear a real joke? Try the government’s continued push for abstinence-only education, despite years of research indicating that it has no statistical impact on teens’ age of sexual initiation or eventual number of partners.
If abstinence-only programs were merely worthless, we might laugh them off. Yet a 2004 congressional study showed that most commonly-used curricula were filled with falsehoods regarding reproductive health: Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31 percent of the time. AIDS can be spread through sweat and tears.
And it’s not only kids who are being misled. That Zogby poll? Please. Contracted by an abstinence group, it repeatedly positioned abstinence education as including “age appropriate discussion of contraceptives” with a “higher emphasis” on self-esteem building over “condom usage skills.”
Who wouldn’t say yes to that? Yet the survey couldn’t be more misleading; abstinence-only programs contain no discussion of contraceptive use. (Parents used as political pawns in this report should contact Zogby and ask for their time back.)
Pregnant teens? No one wants that. Yet I doubt the solution lies with people like Pam Stenzel, a Bush appointee to the Department of Health and Human Service’s task force for abstinence education guidelines. Here’s Pam, when she thinks she’s only among “friends,” addressing the effectiveness of an abstinence-only curriculum at a religious convention: “I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day… I’m answering to God.”
She adds, “AIDS is not the enemy. .. a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy…. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can …sin without consequence …spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy!”
Well, Pam and I agree on one thing: know your enemy. As for dispensing vital birth control and healthcare information? We owe it to the next generation not to abstain from that.
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Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
King Middle School in Portland, Maine has handed out condoms to 11-year-olds since 2000. And the school board just decided to provide prescription contraceptives without parental approval. So the school nurse will know a young girl is sexually active, privately put her on the pill so she can avoid pregnancy, and keep that knowledge from parents who wants to teach their daughter about sexual choices. If this isn’t encouraging students toward sex, I don’t know what is.
Last year, 5 of 134 students visiting the school nurse reported having sex. This problem needs to be addressed, but this is a terrible way to do it. Does anyone really think fewer students will have sex once the pill is available?
Portland school committee member Rebecca Minnick defended her reasoning to the press with, “If it saves one girl from getting pregnant too soon, it’s worth it.” Really? At the cost of sending an incredibly damaging message to hundreds of other students and parents? And how about helping the little girl with the self-destructive choices make better ones, for heaven’s sake?
This is an extreme example, but unfortunately many American schools are not helping children stay abstinent — which is the only real solution for emotional and physical health. Instead school actions often undermine abstinence lip service and send the message that, really, everyone is doing it. Oh, like that helps! Students have enough internal pressure toward sex; they need authority figures to help them fight it, not help them give into it!
As Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association emphasized in an interview, “The Maine decision is a symptom of a bigger problem. Our children are saturated with a sexual culture. In all media and in conversations with classmates, they hear and see sex. In such a culture, schools should promote the best message. On other public health issues, like alcohol or drugs, the school message is always on the best health side. But with sex, the schools often compromise the message and put children at risk.”
Once parents understand abstinence education, a Zogby poll for Huber’s group found they prefer it over comprehensive sex ed by a 2 to 1 margin (61 percent to 30 percent). Schools simply must stop undermining parents and help kids avoid sexual activity.