THERE ARE times when ignorance isn't exactly bliss: When a professor calls on you in class and you have no idea what the answer is. When you don't read the weather report and you find yourself stranded in a blizzard. When what you don't know can, in fact, hurt you.
When it comes to sex education, what you don't know can do more than hurt you - it can kill you. In the era of AIDS, ignorance about sex can be deadly, and young people are often the ones who are dying. Here are some scary statistics: HIV infection is increasing more rapidly among young people than any other age group, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. One in four new HIV infections in the U.S. occurs in people younger than 22.
In times such as these, "abstinence-only" programs - through which teenagers are told virtually nothing about sex beyond "don't do it" - are not going to cut it.
Sex education, or the lack thereof, has become an issue again with the news that the Bush administration is "scaling back efforts to promote family planning and contraception while aggressively promoting 'abstinence-only' programs" ("Administration Promoting Abstinence," The Washington Post, July 30).
Refusing to provide young people with sex education - basic knowledge about what they can do to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies - is patently irresponsible.
Keeping teenagers ignorant about how to protect themselves if they have sex is like sending a soldier into war with a blindfold on and nothing but a butter knife for self-defense.
Conservatives are concerned that putting teenagers through sex education somehow encourages them to have sex. They believe that putting teenagers through a program where abstinence is the only option will prevent them from having sex.
As nice as that may sound, the fact is that most teenagers have sex, regardless of what they are told about it. The 1995 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than half of teenagers aged 15 to 19 were sexually active - specifically, 51 percent of females and 56 percent of males. Two-thirds of all teenagers are sexually active by the time they are 18, and there is nothing, really, that parents can do to stop them, short of building dungeons in their basements (no one get any ideas, now).
So if, in fact, teenagers do have sex, the best we can do is to encourage them to postpone becoming sexually active until they're ready, and provide them with information they need to keep themselves free of STD infection and unwanted pregnancies. We must face the reality that most teenagers will have sex no matter what we tell them. We can all moan about how terrible it is that teenagers are sexually active before they really know what they're doing. We shouldn't, however, act as if not telling teenagers anything about sex will prevent them from having it. That's just not the way it works.
There is proof that abstinence-only education is less effective than sex education when it comes to preventing one obvious consequence of teenage sexual activity: teenage pregnancy. Research shows that recent sharp declines in teenage pregnancy rates among sexually active teenagers are due more to teens' use of contraceptives than a newfound devotion to abstinence. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute's 1994 report entitled "Sex and America's Teenagers," only 20 percent of the decline in the pregnancy rate was due to decreased sexual activity, while 80 percent was the result of the more effective use of contraceptives.
Even with the progress that has been made, teen pregnancy rates are far higher in the United States than in other developed countries, according to the AGI report. U.S. rates are twice as high as those in England and Canada, and nine times as high as those in Japan or the Netherlands. The age at which young people become sexually active in the U.S. and those countries is similar, so looking at the sex education policies in the other countries can point to what causes the pregnancy rates in the U.S. to be higher.
It probably isn't a coincidence that policies in England, Canada, and the Netherlands favor sex education, openness about sex, and access to contraception. If the U.S. continues in the direction of encouraging sex education and giving young people access to contraceptives, the rates of teen pregnancy and AIDS infection may decrease further. Abstinence-only education is more about morality than it is about reality and it simply won't get the job done.
(Laura Sahramaa is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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