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Does sex education prevent or increase teenage pregnancies?
In comments to my previous post, a discussion started about sex education. Does sex education in fact lead to an increase in unsafe sex? My information came from the book by T. Sowell, "The vision of the anointed", 1995. Note that this book was published as the rate of teenage pregnancies peaked.
Page 8:
PATTERNS OF FAILURE
A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored
by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages:
STAGE 1. THE "CRISIS": Some situation exists, whose negative
aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is
routinely characterized as a "crisis," even though all human
situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom
asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely
bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described
as a "crisis" has in fact already been getting better for years.
STAGE 2. THE "SOLUTION": Policies to end the "crisis" are
advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to
beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to
detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as
absurd and "simplistic," if not dishonest.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to
detrimental result Z.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental
result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as "simplistic"
for ignoring the "complexities" involved, as "many factors"
went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put
on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies
alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that
occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had
so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often
asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for
the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage
from other factors.
Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be
considered here.
The author then considers the "war on poverty", the sex education, and the criminal justice reforms.
Page 15:
Sex Education
Among the many crusades which gathered new steam during the
1960s was the crusade to spread sex education into the public
schools and through other channels. Among the first acts of the
Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964 was making a grant to a
Planned Parenthood unit in Texas. From a total expenditure of less
than half a million dollars in fiscal year 1965, OEO expanded its
financing of sex education more than five-fold by fiscal year 1966.
STAGE 1. THE "CRISIS": In 1968, it was claimed that
"contraception education and counseling is now urgently needed to help
prevent pregnancy and illegitimacy in high school girls." The head
of Planned Parenthood testified before a congressional
subcommittee in 1966 as to the need for sex education "to assist our
young people in reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock births
and early marriage necessitated by pregnancy." The incidence of
venereal disease among young people was cited by the head of the
New York City Board of Education as showing the need for "a
crash educational program." An article in the American School
Board Journal in 1969 depicted sex education as a way of
combatting "illegitimacy and venereal disease." PTA Magazine likewise
urged sex education to combat "the spiraling rate of venereal
diseases, the pregnancies before marriage, the emotionally disastrous
results of irresponsible sexual behavior."
Similar statements abounded from a variety of sources. But what
was in fact the situation when this kind of "crisis" mentality was
being used to push for more sex education in the schools? Fertility
rates among teenage girls had been declining for more than a decade
since 1957. Venereal disease was also declining. The rate of
infection for gonorrhea, for example, declined every year from 1950
through 1959, and the rate of syphilis infection was, by 1960, less
than half of what it had been in 1950. This was the "crisis" which
federal aid was to solve.
STAGE 2. THE "SOLUTION": Massive federal aid to sex education
programs in the schools, and to "family planning" clinics, was
advocated to combat teenage pregnancy and venereal disease.
After sex education, according to a "Professor of Family Life," a
boy "will find decreased need for casual, irresponsible and self-
centered experimentation with sex." Critics opposed such
actions on various grounds, including a belief that sex education
would lead to more sexual activity, rather than less, and to more
teenage pregnancy as well. Such views were dismissed in the
media and in politics, as well as by the advocates of sex education.
The New York Times editorially rejected "emotions and
unexamined tradition" in this area and its education editor
declared: "To fear that sex education will become synonymous
with greater sexual permissiveness is to misunderstand the
fundamental purpose of the entire enterprise." As in many other
cases, intentions were the touchstone of the vision of the anointed.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: As early as 1968, nearly half of all
schools in the country—public and private, religious and
secular—had sex education, and it was rapidly growing. As sex
education programs spread widely through the American educational
system during the 1970s, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-
year-old females rose from approximately 68 per thousand in 1970
to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980. Among unmarried
girls in the 15- to 17-year-old bracket, birth rates rose 29 percent
between 1970 and 1984, despite a massive increase in
abortions, which more than doubled during the same period. Among
girls under 15, the number of abortions surpassed the number of
live births by 1974. The reason was not hard to find: According
to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the percentage of unmarried
teenage girls who had engaged in sex was higher at every age from
15 through 19 by 1976 than it was just five years earlier. The
rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1975.
Sargent Shriver, former head of the Office of Economic Opportunity,
which led the early charge for more sex education and "family
planning" clinics, testified candidly to a congressional committee
in 1978: "Just as venereal disease has skyrocketed 350% in the
last 15 years when we have had more clinics, more pills, and more
sex education than ever in history, teen-age pregnancy has
risen." Such candor was, however, the exception rather than the
rule among those who had pushed for sex education and birth
control ("family planning") clinics.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Sex education advocates continue to
treat as axiomatic the need for more sex education to combat
teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. As late as 1980, and in
spite of mounting evidence, the Alan Guttmacher Institute proclaimed:
"Teenage pregnancy can, through better education and
preventive services, be, if not altogether avoided, at least reduced,
and through better maternity, abortion and social services, be
reduced in its personal impact on the teenager who does get
pregnant." Opposition to sex education continued to be dismissed as a
"simplistic view" in the American Biology Teacher journal.
Congressman James H. Scheuer of New York found that the alarming
statistics on rising teenage pregnancy only "highlights the need
for strong leadership by the Federal Government in solving this
problem." The very possibility that "strong" federal
"leadership" might have worsened the situation was not even mentioned.
To the Alan Guttmacher Institute as well, an "almost
quadrupling" of venereal disease between 1960 and 1972 only showed
that more "broadly based national programs channeled through
the public school system are needed and are long overdue."
Opposition to sex education has been depicted as "a threat to a
democratic society." When confronted with the evidence that
pregnancy and abortions increased during the 1970s, sex
education advocates often deny that sex education was widespread
during that decade, by restricting the term "sex education" to
compulsory sex education, which tended to be mandated later.
Although sex education programs have been sold to the public, to
Congress, and to education officials as ways of reducing such
tangible social ills as teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, many of
the leaders of this movement have long had a more expansive
agenda. As a congressional committee report noted gingerly:
"The primary objective of Federal efforts in family life and sex education
has been to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates among teenagers,
while the primary goal of most sex educators appears to be
encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality."
In short, however politically useful public concern about teenage
pregnancy and venereal disease might be in obtaining government
money and access to a captive audience in the public schools, the
real goal was to change students' attitudes — put bluntly, to
brainwash them with the vision of the anointed, in order to supplant the
values they had been taught at home. In the words of an article in the
Journal of School Health, sex education presents "an exciting
opportunity to develop new norms." Only in the light of this agenda does
it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to
take place throughout the school years — from kindergarten to
college — when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic
biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is
a constant indoctrination in new attitudes. An example of such
indoctrination may be useful:
A popular sex instructional program for junior high school students,
aged 13 and 14, shows film strips of four naked couples, two
homosexual and two heterosexual, performing a variety of sexually explicit
acts, and teachers are warned with a cautionary note from the sex
educators not to show the material to parents or friends: "Many of the
materials of this program shown to people outside the context of the
program itself can evoke misunderstanding and difficulties."
Parents who learned of this program and protested were quickly
labeled "fundamentalists" and "right-wing extremists," even though
they were in fact affluent Episcopalians in Connecticut. Here is an
almost textbook example of the vision of the anointed, preempting
the decisions of parents as to when and how their own children shall
be introduced to sex — and dismissing out of hand those with
different views. Nor was this episode peculiar to this particular school.
Similar things have happened all over the country. Parents are
denigrated both in discussions of public policy and in the materials
given to students in the schools. A typical comment from "experts"
is that "sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical
to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful
to share useful sexual information with his child."
This utter certainty of being right, even to the point of
circumventing parents, is completely consistent with the vision, however
inconsistent it is with decades of empirical evidence on the actual consequences
of "healthy attitudes toward sex" as promoted by "experts."
The key point about the sex education crusade, from the standpoint
of understanding the vision of the anointed, is that evidence proved
to be as irrelevant here as on other issues.
Official historical data on teenage births is available here,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/n
This document (coming from the Center for Disease Control) states in its conclusion,
Numerous factors have been credited with a role in the downward trend in teen birth rates since 1991, and the intensified declines since 2007. The 23% increase in teen birth rates from 1986 through 1991 generated widespread public concern at the beginning of the 1990s. This, in turn, led to a variety of initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, including public, private, and joint efforts to influence the attitudes and behaviors of teenagers with a strong focus on pregnancy prevention through abstinence and, for sexually active teenagers, the use of effective contraception (41–44). The latest data from CDC/NCHS’ National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) show a two-decade gradual decline in the proportion of teen females who are sexually experienced (9). NSFG also shows significant increases over the last two decades in the use of contraception at first sex and at most recent sex. (...)
Using data from this document, I compiled an analysis of trends in unwed teenage births between 1956 and 2012:
The rate peaks in 1994 at 45 per 1000 and starts declining. The rate in 2012 is 27 per 1000, which is the same as it was in 1979. The decline is slower than the growth was, and almost (but not quite) monotonic. The present unwed teenage birth rate is not at an all-time low.
Birth are not the same as pregnancies. CDC does not have comparable data on pregnancies, and I was not able so far to find this data elsewhere. However, the two graphs here,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/factsheets/f
show that pregnancy rates and birth rates approximately track each other between 1976 and 2010.
In comments to my previous post, a discussion started about sex education. Does sex education in fact lead to an increase in unsafe sex? My information came from the book by T. Sowell, "The vision of the anointed", 1995. Note that this book was published as the rate of teenage pregnancies peaked.
Page 8:
PATTERNS OF FAILURE
A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored
by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages:
STAGE 1. THE "CRISIS": Some situation exists, whose negative
aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is
routinely characterized as a "crisis," even though all human
situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom
asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely
bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described
as a "crisis" has in fact already been getting better for years.
STAGE 2. THE "SOLUTION": Policies to end the "crisis" are
advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to
beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to
detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as
absurd and "simplistic," if not dishonest.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to
detrimental result Z.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental
result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as "simplistic"
for ignoring the "complexities" involved, as "many factors"
went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put
on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies
alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that
occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had
so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often
asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for
the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage
from other factors.
Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be
considered here.
The author then considers the "war on poverty", the sex education, and the criminal justice reforms.
Page 15:
Sex Education
Among the many crusades which gathered new steam during the
1960s was the crusade to spread sex education into the public
schools and through other channels. Among the first acts of the
Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964 was making a grant to a
Planned Parenthood unit in Texas. From a total expenditure of less
than half a million dollars in fiscal year 1965, OEO expanded its
financing of sex education more than five-fold by fiscal year 1966.
STAGE 1. THE "CRISIS": In 1968, it was claimed that
"contraception education and counseling is now urgently needed to help
prevent pregnancy and illegitimacy in high school girls." The head
of Planned Parenthood testified before a congressional
subcommittee in 1966 as to the need for sex education "to assist our
young people in reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock births
and early marriage necessitated by pregnancy." The incidence of
venereal disease among young people was cited by the head of the
New York City Board of Education as showing the need for "a
crash educational program." An article in the American School
Board Journal in 1969 depicted sex education as a way of
combatting "illegitimacy and venereal disease." PTA Magazine likewise
urged sex education to combat "the spiraling rate of venereal
diseases, the pregnancies before marriage, the emotionally disastrous
results of irresponsible sexual behavior."
Similar statements abounded from a variety of sources. But what
was in fact the situation when this kind of "crisis" mentality was
being used to push for more sex education in the schools? Fertility
rates among teenage girls had been declining for more than a decade
since 1957. Venereal disease was also declining. The rate of
infection for gonorrhea, for example, declined every year from 1950
through 1959, and the rate of syphilis infection was, by 1960, less
than half of what it had been in 1950. This was the "crisis" which
federal aid was to solve.
STAGE 2. THE "SOLUTION": Massive federal aid to sex education
programs in the schools, and to "family planning" clinics, was
advocated to combat teenage pregnancy and venereal disease.
After sex education, according to a "Professor of Family Life," a
boy "will find decreased need for casual, irresponsible and self-
centered experimentation with sex." Critics opposed such
actions on various grounds, including a belief that sex education
would lead to more sexual activity, rather than less, and to more
teenage pregnancy as well. Such views were dismissed in the
media and in politics, as well as by the advocates of sex education.
The New York Times editorially rejected "emotions and
unexamined tradition" in this area and its education editor
declared: "To fear that sex education will become synonymous
with greater sexual permissiveness is to misunderstand the
fundamental purpose of the entire enterprise." As in many other
cases, intentions were the touchstone of the vision of the anointed.
STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: As early as 1968, nearly half of all
schools in the country—public and private, religious and
secular—had sex education, and it was rapidly growing. As sex
education programs spread widely through the American educational
system during the 1970s, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-
year-old females rose from approximately 68 per thousand in 1970
to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980. Among unmarried
girls in the 15- to 17-year-old bracket, birth rates rose 29 percent
between 1970 and 1984, despite a massive increase in
abortions, which more than doubled during the same period. Among
girls under 15, the number of abortions surpassed the number of
live births by 1974. The reason was not hard to find: According
to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the percentage of unmarried
teenage girls who had engaged in sex was higher at every age from
15 through 19 by 1976 than it was just five years earlier. The
rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1975.
Sargent Shriver, former head of the Office of Economic Opportunity,
which led the early charge for more sex education and "family
planning" clinics, testified candidly to a congressional committee
in 1978: "Just as venereal disease has skyrocketed 350% in the
last 15 years when we have had more clinics, more pills, and more
sex education than ever in history, teen-age pregnancy has
risen." Such candor was, however, the exception rather than the
rule among those who had pushed for sex education and birth
control ("family planning") clinics.
STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Sex education advocates continue to
treat as axiomatic the need for more sex education to combat
teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. As late as 1980, and in
spite of mounting evidence, the Alan Guttmacher Institute proclaimed:
"Teenage pregnancy can, through better education and
preventive services, be, if not altogether avoided, at least reduced,
and through better maternity, abortion and social services, be
reduced in its personal impact on the teenager who does get
pregnant." Opposition to sex education continued to be dismissed as a
"simplistic view" in the American Biology Teacher journal.
Congressman James H. Scheuer of New York found that the alarming
statistics on rising teenage pregnancy only "highlights the need
for strong leadership by the Federal Government in solving this
problem." The very possibility that "strong" federal
"leadership" might have worsened the situation was not even mentioned.
To the Alan Guttmacher Institute as well, an "almost
quadrupling" of venereal disease between 1960 and 1972 only showed
that more "broadly based national programs channeled through
the public school system are needed and are long overdue."
Opposition to sex education has been depicted as "a threat to a
democratic society." When confronted with the evidence that
pregnancy and abortions increased during the 1970s, sex
education advocates often deny that sex education was widespread
during that decade, by restricting the term "sex education" to
compulsory sex education, which tended to be mandated later.
Although sex education programs have been sold to the public, to
Congress, and to education officials as ways of reducing such
tangible social ills as teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, many of
the leaders of this movement have long had a more expansive
agenda. As a congressional committee report noted gingerly:
"The primary objective of Federal efforts in family life and sex education
has been to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates among teenagers,
while the primary goal of most sex educators appears to be
encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality."
In short, however politically useful public concern about teenage
pregnancy and venereal disease might be in obtaining government
money and access to a captive audience in the public schools, the
real goal was to change students' attitudes — put bluntly, to
brainwash them with the vision of the anointed, in order to supplant the
values they had been taught at home. In the words of an article in the
Journal of School Health, sex education presents "an exciting
opportunity to develop new norms." Only in the light of this agenda does
it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to
take place throughout the school years — from kindergarten to
college — when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic
biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is
a constant indoctrination in new attitudes. An example of such
indoctrination may be useful:
A popular sex instructional program for junior high school students,
aged 13 and 14, shows film strips of four naked couples, two
homosexual and two heterosexual, performing a variety of sexually explicit
acts, and teachers are warned with a cautionary note from the sex
educators not to show the material to parents or friends: "Many of the
materials of this program shown to people outside the context of the
program itself can evoke misunderstanding and difficulties."
Parents who learned of this program and protested were quickly
labeled "fundamentalists" and "right-wing extremists," even though
they were in fact affluent Episcopalians in Connecticut. Here is an
almost textbook example of the vision of the anointed, preempting
the decisions of parents as to when and how their own children shall
be introduced to sex — and dismissing out of hand those with
different views. Nor was this episode peculiar to this particular school.
Similar things have happened all over the country. Parents are
denigrated both in discussions of public policy and in the materials
given to students in the schools. A typical comment from "experts"
is that "sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical
to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful
to share useful sexual information with his child."
This utter certainty of being right, even to the point of
circumventing parents, is completely consistent with the vision, however
inconsistent it is with decades of empirical evidence on the actual consequences
of "healthy attitudes toward sex" as promoted by "experts."
The key point about the sex education crusade, from the standpoint
of understanding the vision of the anointed, is that evidence proved
to be as irrelevant here as on other issues.
Official historical data on teenage births is available here,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/n
This document (coming from the Center for Disease Control) states in its conclusion,
Numerous factors have been credited with a role in the downward trend in teen birth rates since 1991, and the intensified declines since 2007. The 23% increase in teen birth rates from 1986 through 1991 generated widespread public concern at the beginning of the 1990s. This, in turn, led to a variety of initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, including public, private, and joint efforts to influence the attitudes and behaviors of teenagers with a strong focus on pregnancy prevention through abstinence and, for sexually active teenagers, the use of effective contraception (41–44). The latest data from CDC/NCHS’ National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) show a two-decade gradual decline in the proportion of teen females who are sexually experienced (9). NSFG also shows significant increases over the last two decades in the use of contraception at first sex and at most recent sex. (...)
Using data from this document, I compiled an analysis of trends in unwed teenage births between 1956 and 2012:
| period | trend | my hypothetical explanation |
| 1956-1964 | constant at 15 per 1000 | baseline value |
| 1964-1970 | growing to 22 per 1000 | "sexual revolution", wide use of "the pill" from 1962 onwards |
| 1970-1976 | constant at 22-23 per 1000 | |
| 1977-1991 | growing to 44 per 1000 | "pro-sex" sex education is widespread from 1975 onwards |
| 1991-1995 | constant at 44-45 per 1000 | beginning of shift towards abstinence education |
| 1995-2012 | decreasing to 27 per 1000 | abstinence education, first massively federally funded in 1996 |
The rate peaks in 1994 at 45 per 1000 and starts declining. The rate in 2012 is 27 per 1000, which is the same as it was in 1979. The decline is slower than the growth was, and almost (but not quite) monotonic. The present unwed teenage birth rate is not at an all-time low.
Birth are not the same as pregnancies. CDC does not have comparable data on pregnancies, and I was not able so far to find this data elsewhere. However, the two graphs here,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/factsheets/f
show that pregnancy rates and birth rates approximately track each other between 1976 and 2010.
