Abstinence-Only Education: How's that Going for Ya?

(More posts to the ol' flog than usual while I conduct some research to fill in a vacuum created by a touch of writer's block.)

One thing about having kids well into your 40s, a friend recently confessed, is that those estrogen surges that keep you up at night coincide conveniently with 2 a.m. feedings, frequent visits from the night-terrored toddler, and childhood illnesses for which the wee hours favor fever, pus, and poop. For those of us who started families much earlier, we are grateful for these extra hours to catch up on our reading. More specifically, reading defined as a crash-course on the recent history of the world our late-parenthood peers optimized with advanced degrees, entrepreneurial pursuits, travel (that would be Jennifer), and career superhighways. When Mother Goose and Harry Potter displace literature, PTA meetings replace social-political discourse, homework supervision becomes your higher education, and harnessing the adolescent mind your only outlet for critical thinking, that's two decades of serious ground to cover. And so it was, between the hours of 2 and 5 this morning, I endeavored to bring myself up to date on an issue surprisingly relevant to this very topic: abstinence-only education. (You snicker, but just wait.) The recent issue of the New Yorker features an article by Margaret Talbot on the outcome of the red-state Christian paradigm to engender their youth with conservative attitudes towards sex and sexuality. In Red Sex, Blue Sex, Talbot does a thorough job of exposing the abstinence-only education myth. I have nothing to add. I'm recommending it here as one of the best cautionary tales of all time.

In those states populated by Christian evangelicals who teach abstinence-only education, the lesson appears lost on their daughters. Presumably to ennoble their heirs with the the promise of secure marriages, large families, and happy futures, abstinence-only educators inform the sexuality of their youth with messages of shame, sin, and foreboding. Consider the consequences once those young couples bring that particular brand of sexuality to the marriage bed. You got it: high divorce rates. Some of the highest in the land. (Ironically, teenagers who live with both parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not, the article reports. Can you say legacy?) It appears, unsurprisingly, that few evangelical teens get to realize the virginal marriage, though they do bring along their ill-informed attitudes (and presumably end up passing them on to their own sons and daughters.)

Consider some of Talbot's points (some written verbatim, some edited for space) based on findings in a government study of adolescent health known as Add Health, national studies, and interviews with family-law scholars and sociologists -- all cited correctly in the article:

*On average, white evangelical Protestants make their sexual debut shortly after turning sixteen.
*Evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less like to use contraception
*Only half of sexually active teenagers who say they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time.
*By contrast, sixty-nine percent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or other trusted adult consistently use protection.
*More than half of those who take a pledge of celibacy before marriage end up having sex before marriage, not usually with a future spouse.
*Communities with high pledge rates also have high rates of STDs
*In some schools where celibacy pledge rates exceed thirty percent, the special identity is lost and the formula collapses.
*Red-states populated by social conservatives have the highest rates of divorce and teen-pregnancy, while blue states had the lowest rates. Red states had lowest media age of marriage; blue states had highest. People in red states tend to marry earlier - in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than seeking an abortion. Yet nationally, women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later.
*The paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in her life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing. (Couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including education -- There's that pre-40/post-40 parenthood thing.)

You get the picture. One of the most fascinating parts of the article is an examination of the new middle-class morality. According to Talbot, middle-class moral teenagers"see abstinence as unrealistic and are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage, they just tend not to practice it because it puts too much at stake. They are tolerant of contraception and abortion but are more cautious about premarital sex. They want to remain free from the burden of pregnancy and the embarrassments of STD. They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about their nascent sexuality." Evangelicals might want to check that out.

Talbot goes on to review the drawbacks of both red-state and blue-state sexual attitudes and behaviors, and then she offers some well sourced recommendations. A must read for parents just beginning their families or those sending theirs off to face these issues on their own. Thankfully for them, I'm learning as I catch up on the culture, that the Internet, celebrity sex scandals, all-sex-all-the-time-TV, and sex-driven commercialism hasn't completely destroyed it while I took the stroller for a walk around the block.