Abstaining From Teaching About Contraceptives

Teaching high school students that they can regain their lost virginity may seem like an odd subject for an Orange County classroom. But that is precisely what school districts are asking Priscilla Hurley’s group to do.

What the weeklong program called Choices--Teen Awareness Inc. offers to schools in 11 of the county’s 15 high school districts is “abstinence-only education,” a trend that is gaining clout through national and state legislation.

It also is a growing concern for some health educators who believe that teaching teens to abstain from sex without giving them some backup facts about birth-control techniques can be both dangerous and ineffective.

Terrie Lind, a San Jose-based vice president of community services for Planned Parenthood, said the abstinence-only trend could have serious consequences for districts around the state.

“It is extremely dangerous,” she said of the program. “The very first time you fail to abstain, the method fails, and the failure rate for abstinence is 26%, which are not very good odds.”

Abstinence-only education, she added, is a “political ploy” begun by ultraconservative politicians. It is dangerous because her group’s nationwide statistics show that 60% to 70% of teenagers will be sexually active by the time they leave high school.

“I am very concerned because I don’t think it’s an effective use of taxpayer money,” she said of abstinence-only education. “People need full disclosure so they can make responsible decisions. Shame and guilt are not effective messages for teenagers.”

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But Hurley said that teenagers who have been sexually active can still be persuaded to put that aspect of their lives on hold until marriage--what she calls “second virginity.”

“I think it’s dangerous to say, ‘Once sexually active, always sexually active; let’s throw contraceptives out there,’ ” said Hurley, the director of Choices, now being presented to nearly 20,000 of the county’s students. “We have speakers with the ‘secondary virginity’ approach. It’s never too late to change their minds. We would never say that about kids who have experimented with drugs or alcohol.”

Abstinence as a means of preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is one of the few points on which all sides in the contentious sex education debate can agree.

The more recent question educators must answer is whether abstinence should be the only contraception students are told about.

While no school in California is forced by law to teach sex education, legislation from Washington and Sacramento mandates that abstinence be encouraged in any course that tackles the sensitive subject.

Recent national legislation relating to welfare reform has offered federal funds for abstinence-only education. Gov. Pete Wilson last week unveiled a multimillion-dollar program that would offer this federal money to local groups that do not discuss contraceptives with students.

Since 1991, when the state required districts to teach HIV and AIDS prevention, sex has become a difficult topic to avoid. While programs such as Choices have long been a staple in parochial schools, they are now seen by some as an alternative to groups that teach contraception for districts grappling with AIDS education.

The Orange County Board of Education decided to use the Choices program instead of Planned Parenthood for the schools under its control.

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Nobody is arguing that teenage pregnancy is no longer a problem.

In Orange County, 37 new mothers out of 1,000 are 15 to 17 years old, according to the California Department of Health. Thousands of cases of teens with sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea are reported to the Orange County Health Care Agency each year.

Some health education advocates at the county’s Department of Education also are concerned about the abstinence-only trend.

Studies by the World Health Organization found that a comprehensive approach--which includes teaching how contraceptives work--can increase the odds that students will wait longer to have sex, said Linda Kearns, HIV-AIDS prevention coordinator for the county’s education department. Having more information to digest can give students a sense that they are making their own decisions, she said.

The subject is political and emotional, encompassing deeply held beliefs about religion and morality.

“I think we are a conservative county, and I think teachers would like to be able to provide more information to students,” Kearns said. “These are the questions the students are asking, and teachers know the students are sexually active, but they don’t want to lose their jobs. It’s not just Orange County. I hear this up and down the state.”

Choices does discuss condoms and abortion, but speakers and instructors emphasize the failure potential of the first and the emotional devastation of the second.

“If they are going to get behind the wheel of a car, we want them to know where the car is heading,” Hurley said.