Calderone and SIECUS succeeded by the mid-1960s in encouraging many school boards to introduce sexuality education, though the content of the programs was, to say the least, uneven. Calderone, for example (according to her obituary in 1998), "was an unstinting advocate for the acceptance of masturbation as a wholesome, normal and almost universal practice for people of all ages," but it was hardly a subject featured in most classes. Meanwhile, the John Birch Society and other groups fought back with attacks on sex education as "smut," "destructive of religious belief" and a "filthy communist plot." Groups like MOMS (Mothers Organized for Moral Stability) and PAUSE (People Against Unconstitutional Sex Education) opposed sex ed in state legislatures, local communities and the courts. Judges were not generally inclined to second-guess school boards, however, and sometimes even noted (in the words of one California court) that parents do not have "a monopoly over the thoughts of their own children or anyone else's."

Opponents of sex ed were further frustrated in the 1970s and early '80s when the federal government, in response to reports of more than a million teen pregnancies in the United States annually and more than 600,000 births, began to fund family-planning clinics and contraceptive information. Adolescent pregnancy rates in the United States were far higher than in any other industrialized country (most of which had similar rates of teen sexual activity)--fifteen times higher than Japan's, and twice as high as sexually emancipated Scandinavia's. Although a variety of reasons were posited for the problem, the lack of accurate, widely available contraceptive information was one obvious factor.

As government grants for contraceptive outreach multiplied, the right mounted a new counterattack. If sexuality education could not be suppressed, at least it could be altered to conform to a pro-chastity worldview. Phyllis Schlafly, a leading player in this game, wrote indignantly in 1981 that "nearly all existing sex education curricula" taught "how to enjoy fornication without having a baby and without feeling guilty." Her activism inspired the creation of a new organization called the Committee on the Status of Women, which later became Respect, Incorporated, and produced the famous Sex Respect curriculum for grades 7-9. Another pro-chastity program, Facing Reality, was produced for high schoolers, along with other texts, parent/teacher guides and audiovisual aids. These right-wing curriculums pushed "abstinence only" based on exaggerated fears of emotional devastation, STDs and death from premarital sex. "There's no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone," announced Sex Respect, adding the exaggerated and misleading assertion that HIV can pass through latex condoms and be contracted by kissing. Facing Reality's Parent/Teacher Guide characterized as "mythology" the idea that condoms can prevent pregnancy or STDs, and catalogued forty-five separate perils of premarital sex, including "inability to concentrate on school, syphilis, embarrassment, abortion, shotgun wedding...heartbreak, infertility, loneliness, cervical cancer, poverty, loss of self-esteem, loss of reputation, being used, substance abuse, melancholy, loss of faith, possessiveness, diminished ability to communicate" and death. In one video designed for use with Sex Respect, a student asks an instructor, "What if I want to have sex before I get married?" "Well, I guess you'll just have to be prepared to die," the instructor replies.

These early-abstinence curriculums were also explicitly religious. Sex Respect urged students to "attend worship services regularly" and suggested that "nature seems to be making a statement about the wisdom of keeping sex within marriage through the current epidemic of STDs and teen pregnancy." Although the overt religiosity was gradually eliminated because of concerns about the separation of church and state, the second- and third-generation versions of these fear-based programs are now used in many of the classrooms affected by the 1996 abstinence law. (Although national figures are not available, Project Reality reports sales to more than 350 schools in Illinois alone; and Teen-Aid, another producer of abstinence curriculums, boasts of training 300-500 teachers across the country every year.)

During the Reagan years, abstinence-only pedagogy benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal largesse for promotion, curriculum development and pilot projects. As a contributor to Conservative Digest gratefully wrote, the 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act "was written expressly for the purpose of diverting money that would otherwise go to Planned Parenthood into groups with traditional values"; if not for "the seed money provided by the federal government, Sex Respect might still be just an idea sitting in a graduate student's thesis." (The graduate student in question was Coleen Kelly Mast, Sex Respect's author.) Although critics complained of bias in favor of traditional two-parent families and the disparagement of divorced and single-parent families, as well as gay men and lesbians, by the 1990s somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of the nation's schools were using an abstinence-only curriculum. Some communities engaged in ferocious political battles as newly elected school-board majorities substituted abstinence curriculums for more comprehensive, less ideologically loaded texts. In one 1994 case, a Louisiana court ruled that using Sex Respect and Facing Reality in public schools violated state law proscriptions against the teaching of religious beliefs or medically inaccurate information.

In 1991 SIECUS and its allies responded to the right-wing challenge with a comprehensive set of guidelines for K-12 sexuality education, endorsed by more than 100 professional and advocacy organizations ranging from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to Catholics for a Free Choice. The guidelines (updated in 1996) followed the conventional wisdom among sexuality educators: that sex ed must begin early (as one British author said, if kids are not given basic facts they will construct their own, "often of the mythological variety"). So, for example, elementary school classes would discuss reproduction, masturbation and puberty--well in advance of its arrival. Contraception, gender roles, varieties of sexual behavior and homosexuality would be covered later. Older students would learn, among other things, that most women "need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm" and that most couples "do not experience simultaneous orgasm during vaginal intercourse."

The guidelines were certainly comprehensive--but rarely implemented in their entirety. Even among school districts that resisted abstinence-only, typical sex-ed programs lasted just a few weeks and were tucked into physical education classes. As former SIECUS president Debra Haffner acknowledged, even the more liberal ones consisted primarily of "disaster prevention and organ recitals." Given this fearful approach, it was not surprising that US teen pregnancy rates remained higher than in any other industrialized nation. By the late 1980s, the US rate was about one in ten--six times the rate in the Netherlands--and more than half of those pregnancies resulted in live births. The corresponding teen birthrate for Japan was four per 1,000; for Denmark, 16; for Italy, 23. A 1998 study found that US youngsters scored the lowest of thirteen nations on basic sexual and reproductive knowledge.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.