COLUMN: Put the sex back into sexual education

    First, I’d like to acknowledge Brian Evans’ article in response to my previous column. He is correct, I should have cited better sources. Although my base argument still stands – that athletes should meet the same academic requirement as nonathletic peers to receive those scholarships – I am glad he pointed this out and will not make that mistake again. Thank you, Brian. And now, onto the good stuff.

    If you’re reading this, you probably live in Utah and reality for way too many Utah youth is that they do not receive essential comprehensive sex education in school or at home. They are exposed to risks with lifelong impacts such as HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea and pregnancy primarily because our elders, who have the responsibility of educating them with the proper knowledge to protect them, did not do so.

    Although research consistently shows that abstinence-only sex education does not have any impact whatsoever on unsafe sexual practices, it still has an abundance of advocates. Conservative professionals like Miriam Grossman, whose personal tagline is “100 percent M.D., 0 percent P.C.,” criticize organizations like Planned Parenthood as groups with social agendas, arguing that they undermine parents. She believes the message these organizations send “…(are) about sexual rights and the freedom to make their own decisions at any age, regardless of what adults think.” Miriam, I hate to break it to you, but youth have agency and therefore the freedom to make those decisions and you can bet your left ovary that they will.

    A major advocate of abstinence-only sex education is unsurprisingly that of religious persons. According to one study, church attendance was directly linked to negative attitudes towards sex education (Chappell, Maggard, and Gibson, 2006). Because many religious parents feel that abstinence is the best and most moral cause against sex before marriage, they see no need for sex education because they anticipate that children will simply follow their moral obligations to God – and we all know how often that happens. Ironically enough, it is immoral to withhold information that can be vital to the health and well-being of someone; yet that is exactly what is going on in abstinence-only sex education.

    Some believe that teaching youth to be safe about sex encourages them to go out and romp wildly in the roses with whoever comes their way. On the contrary, research shows that comprehensive sex education does have a significant preventative effect on sexual behaviors in youth. They have fewer sexual partners and are more likely to use protection when they do have sex (Somers and Surmann, 2005).

    Although most adults agree that some type of sex education is needed, they disagree on what actually should be taught. What, then, is comprehensive sex education? The most comprehensive sex education will include abstinence, but will also include methods of contraception such as birth control and condoms, as well as protection techniques for less common sexual practices, like queer sex or oral and anal sex. Most abstinence-only programs teach just the very basics of sex and advocates that abstinence from sexual activity until marriage is the best and safest way to ensure safety and prevent unwanted pregnancy – which, although true, is often the road not taken. Consider the following facts:

    A whopping third of sexually active young women become pregnant before 20 (about 820,000 a year), and four million teens contract a sexually transmitted disease each year. Mothers unprepared to have children lead to higher poverty rates, more money is spent on treating these teens with STDs and unnecessary fatalities result from the spread of HIV. All of these things can be prevented with the use of protection that results from young adults who are educated about sex.

    I’ll wrap this up by telling you to wrap it up. Tell your friends, too. Spread the information around like you would an STD you didn’t know you had. Get involved in promoting sex education in schools, because not learning math and science isn’t going to kill you; not learning proper protection quite literally could. Get involved in your community and let your school board know that you want safe sex taught in your schools. As Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said, “There is now no doubt that we need sex education in schools … . The lives of our young people depend on our fulfilling our responsibility.”

Liz Emery is a senior majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing. She can be reached at liz.emery@gmail.com.