Since the mid-nineties comprehensive sex education for teens and pre-teens in schools has been whittled away. The current trend is toward abstinence-only education. When I attended high school, there was a great deal of controversy about our own sex education course, because of the text we used - Adolescents Today by John Dacey. The controversy then was over the fact that Dacey did not shy from the topic of homosexual curiosity in adolescents, and offered stories from teens about their experiences. Compromise of that time was a solemn promise from our administration that we would only have the textbooks in class under close supervision, and would be forbidden to read those chapters.

Being curious about something we were forbidden, we managed to sneak peeks at those pages, and managed to hijack a copy of the book for a day. The “borrowed” copy was promptly taken to our school’s print center when the teacher there was out to lunch, and within a week, copies of the forbidden pages were distributed widely. Despite any fears parents and teachers had about our becoming homosexual simply because we read about it, there were only a few students in our class who eventually “came out,” and none of them did before graduating high school.

People could consider this a quaint anecdote with no deeper meaning, but that would be selling it short. It highlights the nature of teenagers (their basic curiosity about all aspects of adulthood), and the futility of expecting teens to not do something they are forbidden. Most parents realize that the surest way to guarantee that a child of any age will do something is to tell that child not to do it. Another basic concept parents understand is that if you do not teach children about the dangers around them, they will not learn how to avoid them. There would be millions of children in burn units today if parents didn’t teach them not to touch hot stoves.

It is unlikely that anyone has spent a great deal of time or effort studying the veracity of these basic concepts of childrearing – they are already part of our collective knowledge, and they have been for generations. We have been studying these concepts as applied to sex education. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy commissioned a study, resulting in the report, “Emerging Answers 2007.” Hidden within the largely scientific writing is one basic principle – there is no evidence to show that abstinence-only education is efficient at discouraging sexual risk-taking in teens and pre-teens. It has not been shown to delay sexual activity, or encourage sexually active teens to resume abstinence. Conversely, the study did find that teens that were taught about contraception, STDs and AIDS, and unplanned pregnancy in an open and honest manner were more likely to avoid sexual risk-taking behaviors.

Because of the political climate today, this study is unfortunately necessary. I knew this finding was true at the ripe old age of 15, when I sat in my sexual education class in high school. Conversations in the classroom, hallways and locker rooms back then were centered on the probabilities that we would end up with an STD or an unintended pregnancy. No one had any desire to end up with either, and we talked rather freely about ways to avoid it. We had a vague idea that “good girls didn’t do it”, but at the same time, we understood that eventually we all would, and that it wasn’t bad or dirty.

The bottom line was that we were given a choice then – we could take the advice offered in class to avoid sexual activity until we were older or married, or we could take the information we were given about the risks, protect ourselves, and become sexually active. The vast majority of my classmates chose to wait, and under a handful of girls in my school were pregnant before graduation. That was out of a population of roughly 1500 students, approximately 60% female.

Now, I cannot rely on my children’s schools to teach them about human sexuality, and I purchased an old copy of Dacey’s book to help me teach them myself. Another basic fact that is part of our society’s knowledge about child rearing is that teens do not like to talk about sex with their parents. It is “creepy” for them – I know it was for me, and I learned more in the classroom. Being pro-choice, I know I will campaign for the resurrection of comprehensive sexual education because it is better than forcing parents to be the primary educators. Teens need to understand that there is nothing wrong with open and honest conversation about sexuality, and they need adults other than their parents to speak with about the issues they face. The lack of comprehensive sexual education robs them of that, and it must be restored if we want to have any hope of slowing the rates of teenage pregnancies, STDs and AIDS. It is also necessary to prevent future generations of women from losing control of their lives because others control their choices.