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What to tell the kids about sex.

Article Excerpt
SEX education has been the Middle East of the culture wars and one of the longest-running, most rancorous battlegrounds of American social policy. For nearly 40 years, conservatives--many of them, though by no means all, observant Catholics and fundamentalist Christians--have been battling the increasing presence in the public schools of a permissive strain of sex education that came to be known as "comprehensive sexuality education." Unlike sex-ed programs from the first half of the twentieth century that had frowned on teen sex, comprehensive sexuality education affected a morally neutral or even positive stance toward adolescent sexual activity, supporting what was usually described as teenagers' "autonomous decision making," and promoting their use of contraception.

The spread of comprehensive sexuality education in the schools coincided with a steep rise in teen sexual activity. The number of teen girls who had had sex went from 29 percent in 1970 to 55 percent in 1990. Fourteen percent of sexually active teens had had four or more partners in 1971; by 1988, that number had increased to 34 percent. But though sex educators had sought to encourage teens to practice what they called "responsible decision making," their efforts did not seem to be paying off. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s American teenagers were not just having more sex; they were getting pregnant--and at rates that far surpassed those in other industrialized countries. Between 1972 and 1990, there was a 23 percent increase in the rate of teen pregnancy, and there was a similar increase between 1975 and 1990 in births to teen mothers.

The culture war

Thus it is hardly surprising that the new sex ed became a rallying point for the populist uprising that eventually gave rise to Reagan Democrats, the school-choice movement, and other grassroots groups chafing at the social upheavals of the sixties. Traditionalist parents opposed to sex education were often the working- and middle-class mothers of school-aged children. Sex educators, on the other hand, had influential friends in Washington and New York, including Planned Parenthood, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and leading professional groups like the American Medical Association. While the federal government never directly funded comprehensive sexuality-education programs, over the years it did provide numerous funding streams, such as that from the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH), that were often used to support them.

True, in the early years of the Reagan administration, traditionalists had one notable success in Washington when Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), earmarking $11 million for programs to "promote chastity and self-discipline." But "the chastity bill," as it came to be called, became bogged down in the courts when opponents charged that it violated the separation of church and state, and it remained a marginal cause and the subject of much eye-rolling among health professionals. At any rate, by the time AFLA was passed, 94 percent of school districts saw "informed decision making" as the major goal of sex education according to a 1981 study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and for years after that, comprehensive sex education, though often sanitized for middle-class communities, was the national norm.

Today, the reign of comprehensive sex ed appears to be faltering. This is largely due to Title V, a junior provision of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the landmark 1996 welfare-reform bill. Title V put substantial money behind what is now known as "abstinence education"--that is, teaching children to abstain from sexual intercourse. States could receive $50 million a year for five years in the form of a block grant as long as they matched three dollars for every four from the federal government. In 2000, Congress added another abstinence initiative called Special Projects of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS). Today, the federal government earmarks over $100 million annually for abstinence education. But despite close analysis by researchers and journalists on the legislation and its impact on welfare mothers and their children, in the seven years since Congress passed welfare reform, Title V's rationale and legacy remain somewhat clouded.

A broad coalition

Critics and supporters of Title V can agree on one thing: At the time it was passed, it was a profoundly radical initiative. The architects of Title V believed that they were challenging not just the sex-ed establishment but American society overall. In a paper written for the American Enterprise Institute, Ron Haskins and Carol Statuto Bevan, congressional aides closely involved in writing Title V, conceded that "both the practices and standards in many communities across the country clash with the standard required by the law." And this, they wrote, "is precisely the point.... [T]he explicit goal of abstinence education programs is to change both behavior and community standards for the good of...

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