"It doesn't work"

Last week well-known Canadian sex educator Sue Johanson paid a visit to The Hour. During her interview, Sue made the following observation regarding the preferred message of sex education in the United States: “They don’t teach sex ed. They teach abstinence-only and you know that it doesn’t work”. Sue Johanson knows of what she speaks.

In the United States, George W. Bush has consistently been an advocate of abstinence-only education. While the Governor of Texas (1995-2000), the Bush administration spent over ten million dollars on “abstinence-only-until-marriage education”. With this in mind I found the following statistics rather interesting:

• In Texas, 220 teen females aged 15 to 19 become pregnant every single day (1)
  
• Texas has the second worst teen birth rate among 15- to 19-year-old females, ranking 49th out of 50 states. Only Mississippi has a higher teen birth rate. (2)
  
• Texas ranks last in the decline in teen birth rates among 15-to 17-year-olds. Between 1991 and 1998, the teen birth rate in this age group dropped by more than 21 percent in the United States as a whole; Texas' rate declined by only 10 percent (3)


• Texas has an extremely high number of reported STD cases — accounting for about 10 percent of all reported cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea in the country (4)
  
  

"The folks that are saying condom distribution is the best way to reduce teenage pregnancies obviously haven't looked at the statistics."

—Presidential candidate George W. Bush, November 1999

Since Mr. Bush assumed the Presidency, abstinence-only programs have received in excess of one billion dollars in funding. A Maclean’s magazine article notes that while the US teen pregnancy rate had, at one point, declined and then “flattened out”, in recent years it is been on the rise. The Toronto Star recently reported that the US has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. In theory, abstinence appears to be perfect. But as is quite frequently the case, what sounds good in theory, often fails miserably when put into practice. One cannot help but wonder that if sex education in the US were to be more broad-based, whether both the rate of teen pregnancy and number of cases of STD’s would be reduced.

Fortunately, Canada has taken a more proactive position with regard to sex education by establishing the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education. The guidelines recommend that “Sexual health education should include important topics such as developmental changes (i.e. puberty), rewarding interpersonal relationships, communication, setting of personal limits, media, stereotypes, prevention of STI/HIV, effective contraception, sexual assault/coercion, gender-role expectations, and sexual orientation”. Does this not make more sense than abstinence-only education? I certainly think so.

The simple fact is that young people will have sex. And yes, Canadian teens will continue to get pregnant. No education program can eradicate teen pregnancy or the spread of sexually transmitted disease. But as responsible adults, is it not our job to provide our youth with the knowledge they need to make intelligent choices? We do this with drug education all the time. Oddly enough we don’t think that when we teach kids about the dangers of crack, that their first instinct will be to experiment with it. Conversely, some believe that if we teach a young person how to use a condom, suddenly they will want to have sex. Personally, I give our youth more credit than that.

References:

(1)The Alan Guttmacher Institute. Teenage Pregnancy: Overall Trends and State-by-State Information. New York, New York: 1999
(2), (3) Ventura SJ, Curtin SC, Mathews TJ. Variations in teenage birth rates, 1991-1998: national and state trends. National Vital Statistics Reports 2000; 48(6):1-16.
(4) Division of STD Prevention. 1999 Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2000.