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Teenage Sex: Why Saying 'No' Is Not Enough
| Article
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18939 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
3,088 Words |
| Author
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Nancy Pearcey
Nancy Pearcey writes on science and social issues from her
base in Washington, D.C., and is currently working on The
Scientific Prism, a book on world-views in the history of
science. |
When a recent study revealed that the rate of teen sexual activity rose during the 1980s, leaders of the family planning industry were quick to interpret it as a failure of the decade's social conservatism.
The study, released by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, showed that the proportion of high school girls (aged 15 to 17) who had experienced intercourse rose from 32 percent in 1982 to 38 percent in 1988. The increase continued a trend that began in the sixties and that some observers expected to reach a plateau in the eighties. It was, after all, in the eighties that the nation was forced to face the risks of sexually transmitted diseases (especially AIDS), inspiring, as the Washington Post put it, "an onslaught of public health messages urging [teens] to abstain from sex."
It was also in that decade that social conservatism gained greater political prominence, resulting in, as Jacqueline Darroch Forrest of the Guttmacher Institute said, "an administration where people were preaching about the importance of not having sex."
Family planning representatives have long argued that trying to get young people to refrain from sexual relations is not a viable strategy for dealing with sexually transmitted diseases or adolescent pregnancy. Susan Newcomer, director of education for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), says it is "unrealistic" to expect teens to practice sexual abstinence. She argues that "teens are having intercourse, they have always done so, and no amount of exhortation will cause them to stop" (in "Is It O.K. for PPFA to Say 'No Way'?"). Adults who try to get teens to stop having sexual relations, Newcomer insists, succeed only in getting them to stop listening to adults. In a similar vein, Michael Hall, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Santa Cruz, says teens "will be totally turned off" if adults tell them that certain sexual behaviors are right or wrong.
So when Forrest suggests that "preaching" about abstinence has failed to stem the tide of teen sexual activity, the unspoken implication is that family planning representatives were right all along--that social conservatism is out of touch with the times, that the message of abstinence outside of marriage does not work, that kids will not listen.
Yet, ironically, the same Guttmacher study turned up other data that contradict such a conclusion. It found that over the same period the use of condoms by teens more than doubled. As Forrest
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