You're Teaching My Child What? (18 page)

It doesn't appear that
Sexetc.org
was wary about using scare tactics in this case. Smoking
wrecks
your health from drag one? Cigarettes cause the flu, PMS,
stupidity
?

Don't get me wrong, I agree that smoking is a nasty habit. But let's be honest about the double standard. Educators use scare tactics to influence lifestyle decisions all the time, and no one objects—it's quite the opposite.
Whatever it takes to get kids to stop smoking, drinking, or speeding,
we say:
the ends justify the means.
Only in sex education are so many sobering facts deemed “fear-based,” and omitted from the classroom. And these groups call themselves “science-based” and “medically accurate”? Now that's chutzpah.

I submit that when we're dealing with debilitating, lifelong infections, we should tell it like it is—warts and all. But it won't happen, because ideologues are at the helm, And for them, smoking is a loathsome evil, while teen sex is empowering and fun.

With a few subjects, sex educators
are
comprehensive. One of them is pregnancy prevention. Another is reminding teens that should a pregnancy occur, they have choices.

Try this: ask an adolescent to either find France on a map, identify the second president of the United States, or name three types of contraception. I'll bet that to the average kid who's been through years of comprehensive sex education, the choice is a no-brainer: she'll launch into a discussion about condoms (his and hers), birth control pills,
and Plan B. If she's listened well, she'll be able to reel off their side effects, cost, and relevant legal issues. You know, it's almost a shame this stuff isn't on the SATs.

But how many young people, especially young women, realize the
limits
of their fertility?

Not all young people look forward to having a family some day, but most do. When freshmen—both women and men—at four-year colleges were asked which life goals were essential or very important, 75 percent said “raising a family.”
⁵⁴
Therefore, one would hope that sex education would include not only instruction about preventing or terminating a pregnancy, but also basic facts about fertility, marriage, and building families.

You may be thinking,
Teens need to know about pregnancy prevention because that's relevant to their lives now. Starting a family will be something that happens later. Why teach them about having babies now?

For the same reasons, I'd answer, that we teach them about breast self-exam and osteoporosis. Sites like GoAskAlice and
gURL.com
provide girls with basic facts about these adult conditions. Since most girls want to be moms, shouldn't they know when in their lives it's easiest to conceive and deliver a healthy child?

Sex ed provides kids with pages and pages of information about contraception and abortion, leading them to believe that in a zillion years, when they
do
want to get pregnant, all that's necessary is to stop—stop taking the pill, stop using the diaphragm, and stop wearing a condom. Pull the goalie and let the babies roll. Easy, right?

Try telling that to the hordes of women seeking treatment at fertility centers all over the country. Many of them can't conceive because they waited too long.
⁵⁵
They've realized a biological truth they wish they'd known earlier: pregnancy doesn't always happen when
you
decide you're ready. There's a window of opportunity, then the window closes.
⁵⁶

Young people, especially teen girls, should know about that window, so they can keep it in mind as they make decisions about career
and relationships. We're not doing a good job at that; large numbers of women are misinformed about the limits of their fertility. A 2001 survey showed 89 percent of young, high-achieving women believed they would be able to get pregnant into their forties.
⁵⁷
Another found that women have an excellent understanding of birth control, but they “overestimate the age at which fertility declines.”
⁵⁸
The former director of RESOLVE, a support network for couples coping with infertility, reports: “I can't tell you how many people we've had on our help line, crying and saying they had no idea how much fertility drops as you age.”
⁵⁹

Here are the facts teens need to know. A woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have, so when she turns thirty or forty, her eggs do, too. The easiest time for her to conceive and give birth to a healthy child is in her twenties. At around thirty, her fertility begins to decline, and at thirty-five, it begins to decline dramatically. By forty, her chance of conceiving each month has decreased by 75 percent compared to a decade earlier.
⁶⁰
But what about all those celebrities in their forties and beyond, you may ask, whose gorgeous babies grace the cover of
People
magazine? Many of these older moms have no genetic relationship with their child; adoption or surrogacy had to enable them to achieve their dream of parenthood.
Not that there's anything wrong with that,
but it's something to be aware of.

Teens need to know that using technology to create a child is costly—economically and emotionally—and that some methods are controversial. Many women, troubled by the relentless ticking of their biological clock, pursue extreme measures: spending their nest egg on fertility drugs, using a younger woman's eggs, freezing their own for future use. Next time you're in line at the grocery store, check out the tabloids for photos of middle-aged celebrity mothers. It's unlikely you will come across the following captions: baby on left, born following two years of agonizing treatments costing an arm and a leg; twin girls, right, conceived via
in vitro
fertilization when three embryos implanted, one, another girl, “reduced” in the womb.
People Magazine
can omit these details; it doesn't claim to be medically accurate and comprehensive. Sex education does.

I searched for the word “motherhood” on some of the most popular teen sex ed sites. On Columbia's
GoAskAlice.com
, no matches were found. On
gURL.com
, I was asked to check my spelling. On SexEtc, a bunch of links about teen mothers came up.

What about Planned Parenthood? Their mission is to offer “accurate and complete information to make childbearing decisions” and to preserve “reproductive freedom—the fundamental right of every individual to decide freely and responsibly when and whether to have a child.” Sounds great, but a search of their teen section, Teen Talk, brought up no information about the optimal time to start a family, the whole story about the hazards of Chlamydia, or the regrets of women who always put career first.

It seems fair to ask: does reproductive freedom include the freedom to reproduce?

In
Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children
, Sylvia Ann Hewlett explored the lives of highly educated, high earning women as they turned fifty—women who had broken through the glass ceiling. After the tenth interview, she realized that none of them had children. And they all regretted it.

Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, and others writing curricula are in an ideal position to prevent some of the future anguish and regret of women discovering that their window of reproductive opportunity has closed. They could, for example, include some of the facts I've mentioned in their classes for twelfth graders. They could suggest students read
Creating a Life
. But don't hold your breath. A unit on fertility would highlight the differences between men and women, and students might realize the value of marriage and families. Who knows what could result? A girl might even—
gasp
—reconsider her plans to become a neurosurgeon. No, it won't happen any time soon.

I see things differently. I believe that authentic feminism
protects
women and girls: their health, their choices, and their dreams. If sex educators genuinely cared about young women having accurate and complete information about childbearing, and about preserving their reproductive freedom, their curricula and websites would include this difficult truth: delaying parenthood indefinitely, especially while living a life of casual sexuality, places your dreams of motherhood at risk. Those who object to this “sexist” message need to accept this reality: biology itself is sexist, and that's unlikely to change—even with threats of legal action from the ACLU or NOW. If you take issue with that, well, don't gripe to me about it. Take your complaints to a higher authority.

Y
OUNG BISEXUAL WOMEN
¹
and gay men have the highest rates of genital infections, due in part to early sexual activity. For this reason alone, you'd think educators would target these students with a stern, no-nonsense message of self-restraint.
It's critical that you delay sexual relationships
, you'd expect them to say,
exploring same sex activity can be particularly dangerous.
But even with this vulnerable group, it's the same old story: a green light to early experimentation, detailed how-to instructions, and an assumption of multiple partners.

About their decision to explore same-sex behavior, teens are repeatedly advised, “Do what feels right to you,” and, “It's important to always feel good about yourself.” But we wouldn't instruct anyone, let alone a teenager, to “do what feels right” regarding other risky behaviors—smoking, drinking, or drug use. These experts seem to neglect how kids will
feel
when they've got open blisters on their genitals or
test positive for HIV. For these life and death decisions, how can “educators” recommend kids follow their
feelings?

You want to see madness? Log on to a few sites
²
recommended by sex educators and search under “LGBTQ”—the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning. That should do it.

An enthusiasm for risky liaisons isn't the only problem you'll discover. First of all, the ideology on these sites is suffocating. Instead of sounding an alarm about health risks—the association of oral sex with cancer of the tonsils, for example, or the epidemics of HPV and syphilis among gay men
³
—kids get a hefty dose of leftist indoctrination and recruitment .
⁴
On these websites, the enemy is not genital infections; it's our oppressive, heterosexist society. Instead of HIV, Republicans are in the crosshairs.

On sites recommended by educators, kids are constantly reminded that the country is permeated by homophobic negativity.
⁵
Sexual minorities—everyone not strictly heterosexual—are in the same position as African Americans before the civil rights movement: suffering from widespread ignorance, prejudice and unfair legislation. Teens can make a difference—by becoming activists for change.

On
Sexetc.org
, a site recommended by SIECUS, kids learn about a group called Soulforce, whose mission is “to promote freedom from religious and political oppression for LGBT people.” They ride on a “Bus for Equality,” visiting Christian schools “with policies that exclude openly LGBT young people from enrolling.” If they're allowed on campus, Soulforce members explain how harmful homophobia is. If not, they “find creative ways” to assert their presence off-campus; “This often leads to arrest.”
⁶
The lesson: these kids are to be commended for taking action against injustice.

Advocates for Youth goes a step further—they pay for kids to travel to Washington to participate in four days of Youth Activist Training. The program promises to enhance teens' skills in grassroots, campus, and online organizing as well as media outreach. It includes a day
with congressional staff members, who school teens in effective lobbying techniques.

Social agendas drive the discussion of psychological issues too. Contradicting widely accepted principles of emotional development, kids are reassured that confusion about sexual identity is normal
⁷
and healthy, and that preferences naturally change with time. “Your sexuality is a work in progress,” they're instructed, “a life-long adventure.”