THE BELL CURVE:

I’d like to respond to a recent Pilot Forum letter that seems to have been ignored in the heat of the election — and doesn’t deserve that fate.

The letter, which came from a local resident named Steven J. Dzida, offered up a proposal extremely rare in this deeply divided society — a compromise voice in the hostile debate on abortion (“Let’s unite on the abortion issue,” Mailbag, Oct. 29).

Dzida — who identifies himself as “anti-abortion” — wrote: “What if both sides invested all [their] resources into mutually acceptable programs that would actually reduce the number of abortions?….While we continue efforts to effect a conversion of hearts on this issue, let’s suspend indefinitely our efforts to make abortion illegal and instead concentrate on joint efforts by people of goodwill on both sides of this issue to reduce the number of abortions performed each year.”

Coming on as a self-appointed spokesman for the “other side,” I applaud this approach. I would like only to clarify, up front, one major misunderstanding that makes rapprochement impossible until it is taken off the table.

That would be the use of pro- and anti-abortion to describe the two positions on this issue.

I think I can safely say for those of us who support pro-choice that we are just as firmly committed to reducing the number of abortions as those who identify themselves as “anti-abortion.”

Like Dzida, we recognize that the most effective way to do that is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that are responsible for almost all abortions.

So up to this point, we are on the same page. This gives us at least a rational starting place that Dzida uses to list several programs involved in reducing unwanted pregnancies that we can all get behind.

Leading the list by a wide margin is sex education, and that’s where we run into immediate trouble — especially in our public schools.

For more than five decades, sex education in our schools — even though designed to augment, not replace, the role of family and church — has been vociferously opposed, mostly by political and religious conservatives, to whom abstinence is the only type of sex education they will even consider.

The best example, which I covered for Good Housekeeping magazine, remains the first such program recognized and copied nationally.

It was created to address the growing number of teenage pregnancies in Anaheim’s Union High School District 40 years ago.

The program was inaugurated when reaction to an emotional attack on a ninth-grade film discussing masturbation disclosed that most of the parents in the district not only wanted the film retained but wanted more public school sex education.

So a citizens advisory committee representing 14 major organizations in Anaheim — church, social, civic, fraternal, medical and law enforcement — worked with school officials to develop the Family Life course of study. Although it was always voluntary, less than 1% of the 32,000 eligible students chose to opt out. Each grade from seventh to 12th attempted to deal with the problems children of that age would be meeting, and results were impressive.

The number of pregnancies went steadily down until the rate of pregnancies in the Anaheim High School district after four years of the Family Life program was 3.59 per 1,000 students as contrasted with 9.3 in the state of California as a whole.

Such results brought a flock of visitors from school districts across the nation to study the program that was regarded with pride in the Anaheim community.

It brought other visitors, too. Almost overnight, the Family Life program came under violent attack, led by disciples of the John Birch Society, whose basic dogma was to convert everything they didn’t agree with into a conspiracy of the left.

Family Life opponents used fabricated sex-ed horror stories and outright lies to frighten local citizens and get their candidates on the school board. When they had a majority, they promptly cashiered the program and fired the highly respected high school principal and guiding hand behind the program, Paul W. Cook.

Many of those same arguments are being used today to preserve abstinence as the sole line of attack against unwanted pregnancies. And this is the ground where my views and those of Dzida might work to a common purpose.

It would have to start with three premises. First, that sex education in our public schools is an effective and accessible means at hand to reduce abortions.

Second, that abstinence is not an end-all but rather one of many options useful in this endeavor.

And, third, that attacks on sex-ed using inaccurate and fabricated information to paint it as some sort of political conspiracy must be exposed and rejected. (It would help the third point to stop demonizing Planned Parenthood and make use of its research.)

Looking back over the ashes of the Anaheim Family Life program, Paul Cook said wistfully: “Sex education in any form is going to be anathema to certain segments of our society, and parents who — for religious, philosophical, political or whatever reasons — find Family Life education intolerable must be able to withdraw their children.

Our program was always voluntary, and I know of no other public school sex education program in the United States that isn’t operated the same way.

People who talk about mandatory sex education are talking through their hats.

“But children can’t be protected from these topics. If they are normal healthy children they will think, talk and speculate about their own sexuality.

“And if they are provided simple, factual, unembarrassed information when they are ready to receive it, they will think a great deal less about sex because the conspiracy of silence that cloaks a forbidden — and therefore attractive — subject will have been removed.”

Those words still resonate today. Whether we’ve learned something from them over the last four decades remains to be seen.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.