In school districts all across the country, parents and educators are faced with choices as to what kind of sex education to provide to their adolescent and even pre-adolescent children.  News reports of outbreaks of teen pregnancies in a community, as happened in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 2008, or of high rates of sexually transmitted diseases among teens and young adults are presented as a crisis needing an urgent fix. “Experts” are called in to advise the community leaders what to do. Some resort to the distribution of contraception to 6th graders without the parent being informed, as happened in Portland, Maine.

Others implement a “comprehensive” sex education program that is said to discuss both abstinence and the use of contraceptives. As we have seen, the creative versions of “abstinence” that a number of these “comprehensive” programs teach bear little resemblance to what most Americans think about when they hear the word. Their promotion of sexually arousing “outercourse” behaviors to teens, without any evidence that this strategy reduces sexual intercourse or the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases raises questions about their real motives. Furthermore, many of the most recommended programs are less than honest when discussing the limits of birth control or condom use in preventing pregnancy among teens or protecting teens from sexually transmitted diseases.

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Chapter 20

When school staff and health officials teach young people about, or implicitly advocate certain behaviors without fully informing those students of the risks, they engage in reckless and negligent behavior toward those they portend to educate and protect. In addition the portrayal of parents in some programs (see Planned Parenthood’s Making Sense of Abstinence in chapter 2) as ignorant and mean-spirited reveals a bias and, yes, arrogance that is troubling. Finally, the emphasis in many “comprehensive” sex ed programs that students can obtain birth control without their parent/guardian(s)’ knowledge or permission with no encouragement to discuss these important issues with the very ones who likely care about the students the most, becomes even more disturbing.

An effective propaganda campaign against abstinence-centered education has been conducted since 2004 with most of the mass media displaying a docile willingness to transmit whatever is written on the latest press release of “experts” whose agendas and biases are not examined even in the most cursory manner.