Ross Douthat wrote a fairly innocuous column in the NY Times recently. In it, he argues what I have long held: sex education programs in schools – abstinence and otherwise – are largely ineffective. Again we are largely dealing with the clinicalization of a social problem where the remedy is more education. The idea that young women aren’t engaging in pregnancy avoidance, because they aren’t interested in avoiding pregnancy is an idea that seems completely alien.
Reading the comments to that article has been quite disheartening. The coup de grace of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is of course offered. The argument is impressive in the bubble, but is born of ignorance, something those that offer the argument imagine themselves fighting against. The Palins specifically seem to have been quite proud of the pregnancy. According to media reports, Bristol Palin’s sexual activity was not hidden and even occurred in the Palin home. And while Sarah Palin has been vocally supportive of abstinence education, she never undertook abstinence initiatives while in office. (For those unfamiliar with my previous writings, I have been termed a Palin hater in the past, belief in competent governing will result in that I guess.) More generally, there seems to be this understanding that American Protestantism rejected condom and contraceptive use. Inconveniently, American Protestantism accepted this long ago, considering opposition to condoms, contraceptives, and marital creativity to be artifacts of Romanism. Yes, American Protestantism still doesn’t, for the most part, believe in sex before marriage.
Most sane people, religious and otherwise, don’t believe that sex before marriage is efficacious. The greatest predictors of unintended pregnancy and STD infection remain number of sexual partners, age difference between partners (in particular, older men targeting young women), and sexual technique. I wish I had the citation handy, but a secular researcher noted that were sex precluded until after the 3rd date, we would see significant reductions in STD infection rates and pregnancies. And while the theoretical effectiveness of contraceptive use is high, the practical results are that 10-15% of sexually active women that report using a condom as their primary form of birth control will become pregnant each year. The reason is simply that they don’t always use a condom. (Similar results are common for other methods.) And while it would be convenient to think that all the kids getting pregnant are Jack and Diane like, the reality is that the teenagers becoming pregnant or infected with STDs are not predominantly doing so in long-term and stable relationships. A couple of years ago, we had the case in Massachusetts of 17 women making a pact to get pregnant, and we have people in the bubble bemoaning birth control, as if the availability of birth control would have induced girls that wanted to get pregnant to not get pregnant.
Although I don’t have time to do this justice, I will address briefly the comparisons to Europe. American culture is simply different than Europe. In America, sex is like most other things here, driven to the point of excess. Perhaps, in Europe one could find places where over 10 sexual partners by high school graduation wasn’t exceptional. Like drinking, there are certainly extremists on the other side of the pond, but the U.S. seems to hold its own in ridiculous indulgence.
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