1/11/98
WASHINGTON SHOULDN'T BE DECIDING WHAT SEX EDUCATION IS BEST 
By Linda Seebach 
 
     Last year, as part of the welfare-reform bill, the federal government decided it would give away $50 million annually for five years to groups providing abstinence-based sex education. 
     Naturally that set off the usual undignified scramble for a piece of the government's loose change. In Colorado, where nine groups will share $900,000 in fiscal 1998, charges and countercharges flew. 
     ``People who really have a longstanding commitment to abstinence were given only a token role'' in awarding the grants, said Peter Brandt. He is a spokesman for the Colorado Springs-based National Coalition for Abstinence Education, which gave Colorado a D grade in its national report card. 
     The report card, said Katie Reinisch, is ``part of an ongoing campaign to eliminate responsible sex-education and replace it with a religious agenda of misinformation.'' She is a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. 
     All this squabbling obscures a more basic truth: the federal government shouldn't be dictating sex-education curriculums. 
     The economic reason is that there's really no such thing as ``federal money.'' Washington extracts money from those lower on the political food chain _ individuals and local and state governments _ keeps a chunk for itself, and sends the rest back to us with strings attached. 
     The political reason is that there's no consensus about what sex education should be like or whether it works, and whatever choice enjoys the government's passing fancy will make a lot of people angry. 
     Research has no clear answer either. The medical model of a double-blind test isn't applicable to education unless students are assumed to be unconscious during class, which may be true but rather defeats the purpose of teaching them. Controlled experiments are hard to design and carry out because parents don't want their children to be experimental subjects, not realizing that the whole sex-education project of the last several decades is a massive experiment with no controls. 
     Research results are so inconclusive that no matter what people believe they can cite supporting studies. 
     One of the few things everyone agrees on is that teenage sex is more common than it used to be. SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, says that in the 1950s about a quarter of women 18 years old had had intercourse, rising to 30-35 percent in the '70s and about 56 percent now. For men, the rate went from 55 percent in 1970 to 73 now. 
     For SIECUS, those data show chastity is not the American way. For those who believe in teaching abstinence, the data demonstrate that how-to sex education encourages teen sex. 
     The causal connection is unproved; many things have changed during the past 40 years, not just sex-education curriculums. In other classes, we assume that what children are taught some of them actually learn. If teen sex were something we wanted more of, near-universal sex ed could stake a plausible claim for the credit. Seems only fair it should get some of the blame. 
     I'm not troubled by the fact that a majority of adults have sex before they marry. With puberty coming earlier and marriage coming later it's certainly to be expected though not everyone thinks it should be accepted. 
     But certainly it makes a difference whether the people we are talking about are 14 or 22. Sixteen is too young for most people; a New Zealand study just reported in the British Medical Journal reported not only vain regrets among those who had early intercourse, but also much higher rates of sexually transmitted disease. Twenty is mostly old enough though obviously waiting longer does no harm. 
     Should that opinion be taught in the schols? Of course not _ not my opinion, nor anybody else's. People's values are different and there's no way to reconcile them. 
     There is reason to believe, however, that the abstinence-based curriculum established by the federal law will do less harm than the more permissive curriculums now in common use, given that neither is likely to achieve anything close to total success. 
     The successes of the how-to curriculum are the students who will have sex anyway, but as a result of what they're taught will take fewer risks. The failures are students who wouldn't have had sex except for the implicit encouragement of their sex-education course. No one really knows how many students are in either group, but it shouldn't be too hard to see that the consequences of failure can be severe. 
     The successes of an abstinence-based curriculum are students who initiate sex later than they otherwise would; the failures are those who just do what they were going to do anyway. Those failures at least make nothing worse. 
     These choices are asymmetric in another way. Parents who feel their children are being deprived of essential information about sex are able to provide it themselves, however rarely they may do so in practice. But parents who believe their children have been deprived of innocence too soon have no way to restore it. 
     When schools decide how to teach about sex, the lure of free money should not be their principal guide.