Column: Schools need to discuss sex realistically
Published Jan. 26, 2010
I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for trash TV sometimes. During winter break I had plenty of opportunities to watch a variety of programming on the Food Network, Bravo and my favorite, the Lifetime Channel.
My sister and I are big "Project Runway" fans, and to my delight, after a particularly juicy episode, the channel went straight into a made-for-TV movie called "The Pregnancy Pact." Obviously we couldn't miss something like that.
"The Pregnancy Pact" was a fictionalized account of a real-life story that circulated on national news outlets in 2008. In a small town in the northeast, the teen pregnancy rate at one high school spiked so abruptly in one year, it became clear several young girls entered into a pact with each other to purposefully become pregnant. Although the movie contained your standard Lifetime-type drama, it did get me thinking about teen pregnancy and contraceptive availability.
The crusader of the movie was a young woman who kept insisting the availability of condoms and other contraceptives in schools would automatically take care of the teen pregnancy problem. The antagonist, a very religious mother of one of the pregnant girls, kept clinging to more forceful abstinence education.
Obviously, this issue is a complex one and cannot be solved by one 90-minute Lifetime movie. I do think some of the questions within the issue are easily resolved. I believe if we effectively implement realistic sex education and make contraception — both regular and emergency — readily available to teens and college students, there will be a significant drop in unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
According to the American Pregnancy Association, 3 million sexually active women neglect to use contraception over the course of a year, and there are 15.3 million new STD cases reported every year. Logically, we can assume people don't use contraceptives because they either don't have access to them, or they don't know they should.
In my short investigation into widely ineffective birth control methods, including the "pulling out" method and "rhythm" method, I found that 8 out of 10 top Google hits for these methods described them as "effective," "popular among teens" and "better than nothing."
In the past, the argument for sex education and contraceptive education for teens was born out of the assumption teens didn't know enough about sex, or they wouldn't get realistic information at home. Young people now know quite a bit about sex. We see it on TV and in movies, and sex isn't as culturally taboo as it once was. But, now the problem seems to be teens are receiving too much information from too many outlets, and not all that information is accurate or presented in a responsible manner.
If a young person doesn't have access to condoms or other birth control, either because of parents, money or reluctance to ask for it, it's reasonable to assume that he or she will research the issue on the Internet. I saw a disturbing number of forums about birth control with wildly inappropriate and dangerous advice.
This is why sex should be discussed frankly and realistically in schools. Parents need to play an integral role, but this epidemic needs to be stopped as quickly as possible. Our society needs to stop demonizing (responsible) sexual activity, and finally wise up about teen and young adult sexuality. The implications of ignoring this problem have an alarming conclusion, so we need to deal with unwanted pregnancy and the spread of STD's in a progressive manner.
Jordan Stein is a senior political science major, and she can be reached at jesf25@mizzou.edu