Teach Your Children

You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by.

And so, become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye.

Teach your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks
The one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would die
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

- Graham Nash

Sex education is one of the messy issues brought up by the Presidential election season, with the current administration and the Republican party officially favoring “abstinence only” education. Many people who support this approach also like to teach that condoms are highly unreliable. No wonder kids like Bristol Palin are becoming pregnant too soon: once they decide to have sex, the follow their parents’ teachings and skip the condom, as “it probably won’t work anyway.”

But teenage pregnancy is one of the lesser hurdles faced by uneducated kids having sex. HIV/AIDS and other STDs are very much with us, and they can kill.

This is a crime, and cannot under any circumstances be termed “moral”.

Let’s look at a few of the problems with approaching sex education this way:

1. It leaves the kids woefully unprepared to make informed decisions that can affect their lives. Should they decide to have sex at any point, they don’t know what the physical risks are for different sexual practices, and that includes sexual practices with their new spouse in monogamous relationships.
2. Teaching that condoms are ineffective is just not accurate. They are not perfect, and everyone who wants to protect themselves from sexually-transmitted diseases deserves to know what the real risks are.
3. While abstinence-only education seems to slightly delay the first sexual experience, it does nothing to reduce teenage sexual activity. It may start a little later on, but the kids who take the pledges are still having sex, and they don’t know how to protect themselves.

There is an excellent piece about this written by advert.org, which is a UK-based HIV/AIDS prevention organization. This piece, which is extensively footnoted with many of the studies on various forms of sex education, is at this link. I strongly recommend it.

My question to abstinence-only proponents is this: why can’t you give your kids the moral teaching and strength so most of them will decide to have sex within committed relationships, and give them the knowledge they will need to protect their lives from the serious infections (and pregnancies) that can result from sex? The notion that teaching everything sends a “mixed message” is nonsense: teaching about the physical risks of sexual activity is completely unrelated from teaching about when your moral code says that sex is good. Sooner or later, we hope all our kids will have sex, and when they do, they deserve to know how to survive it.

The fortunate among us who have been in deeply committed relationships know that sex enters a wholly different realm, and that no degree of “hot” casual sex can ever approach it. Our kids deserve the chance to experience that. They also deserve the knowledge they will need to survive. Giving them anything less is highly amoral.

Bill Way
New York, NY
7 September 2008

Explore posts in the same categories: politics

Tags: abstinence, politics, sex education

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.