A report coming out last Wednesday dealt an immense blow to the cultural conservative abstinence only policy. The report said that birth rates of teenagers ages 15-19 rose 3% in 2006, the first increase since 1991. There may be several reasons why teen pregnancy has risen, but one is no doubt the failure of abstinence only education that has been adopted in public schools around the nation. Like so many other policies promoted by social conservatives, abstinence only education is a naïve and scientifically unfounded policy with, as the report demonstrates, tragic results.
The US has long had the highest teen birth rates in the industrialized world, which has begged a formation of sound policy. The conservative response has been a Christian mission to salvage some degree of “morality” in the otherwise secular, scientific public education system (except for maybe recent Intelligent Design encroachment). The Bush Administration offers tens of millions of dollars to states whose sex education programs promote abstinence till marriage and condemn contraceptives as unreliable or ineffective. And the result has been disastrous. Thousands of teenagers deprived of proper education have been unconvinced to wait till marriage resulting in the first increase of teen mother pregnancies in 15 years. Additionally, unmarried motherhood has increased, now standing at 38.5% of all births in the US (NY Times, “Teenage Birth Rate Rises for First Time Since ’91,” 12/6/07). Early pregnancy’s has many harmful effects on young and/or unwed mothers, such as diminution of educational opportunities, the financial burden and the mental stress of child rearing on a not yet fully mature mind, and is often detrimental to the well being of the mother and the infant.
So should there be a change of sex education policy? No, we are told by Heritage Foundation senior researcher Robert Rector, because these young mothers ostensibly know of contraception but actually want to become pregnant. Sadly, this is typical of social conservative thinking, arguing that these individuals lack the proper choice making and responsibility to wait till marriage, and abstinence only education works except for the helpless few (an almost Calvinist approach to sex education). The reality is too many teenagers in America are subjected to non-sense and are told that contraceptives are not effective, that the morning after pill can is akin to abortion (such as this law in Kansas http://www.siecus.org/policy/states/2006/mandates/KS.html) and other unproven, fundamentalist claptrap. The point of sex education is for kids to be taught how to make proper decisions, not how to be moral, upright Christians. Sex education is also meant to eliminate such unnecessary scourges in our society such as teen pregnancy and teen abortion. But the only way this will happen is through sound science, policy and education. Contraceptives work (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/58065.php), and the naïve Christian fundamentalist who want to run our schools have to step out of the Dark Ages and allow teens the sex education that would reign in the unacceptable rate of teen pregnancy in this country.
