Lee Writes:
I was thinking about the headline for this post, and probably this has already occurred to everybody, but why are we expecting people who actively discourage the dissemination of accurate sex ed and family planning information to know very much about reproductive and development physiology? Ignorance is bliss, ya know.
gengwall Writes:
Pro-lifers are not so much against the content of sex ed and family planning info as much as who is disseminating it. It is quite a presumption to contend that pro-lifers can’t disseminate accurate sex ed and family planning information themselves. I, for one, grew up in a pro-life household with a father who was a doctor and had been in general practice delivering babies, etc. for a number of years. The sex ed information I received from my parents was more accurate and detailed than any you can get in the schools and I received it far earlier in life than even the most aggressive public school programs provide it. I know many Christian (I presume that is who you are talking about) families that are very, very open about sexuality and quite willing to talk to their kids about it. Certainly, there are others that aren’t but the same could be said for many non-religious and pro-choice families. The general assumption that Christians don’t want their children to have accurate information about sex education and family planning is where true blissful ignorance actually lies.
Lee Writes:
Gengwall, while there are many Christian families who are like yours and mine in terms of being open about providing sex ed and other reproductive information to their children, and many of these may also be pro-life, in my experience, the more fiercely pro-life the adults are, the less likely they are to provide their children with ANY sex-ed or other information. My husband’s parents, for instance, never told him anything, and sent him to a very conservative Christian school besides, where the extent of the sex ed was pretty much, “Don’t do it until you’re married.” My roommate in college frequently got into trouble because of the (accurate) information she disseminated at slumber parties.
Most of my family are teachers. Every year, each of the ones that teach at the secondary level have at least one homeroom student whose parents refuse permission for them to attend the hygiene and sex ed classes. Every year, there are always a handful of girls in the upper elementary, junior high, and even high school levels who have no clue what is happening to them once a month. These two groups frequently overlap. And in my family, the general rule of thumb for handling the situation is to call the parents to give them a choice: tell your kid yourself, or he/she gets sent to the school nurse for a little talk about hygiene. Just last week, my sister had a conversation with a parent who asked HER to talk to her 15-year-old, because “I know you’re a good Christian woman and won’t tell her anything she doesn’t need to know.” Grrr.
I would feel a lot better about this anti-public-school sex ed position if I could feel confident that the parents were, in fact, informing their kids. And the avoidance strategy many of these parents use frequently feeds right in to not knowing enough about other reproductive issues, like this guy mentioned above who just found out about ectopic pregnancies, to make informed public policy decisions.
