May 2008
Faith, Hope, and Chastity
Is there any good way to teach your kids about sex?
Illustration by Carl DeTorres
Monica is seventeen years old. When I met her in January, she was seven months pregnant with her second child. Her fifteen-month-old girl, Anevaeh, wandered through the room with a purple pacifier in her mouth. Monica should have been preparing to graduate from high school. Instead, she was finishing tenth grade. She and her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Thomas, swore that they usually used condoms, which they acquired free from their local Planned Parenthood clinic. But twice, when they were caught in the heat of the moment without a supply, they took their chances. Both times Monica got pregnant.
Monica had no illusions about how it had happened. “I got sex ed in school,” she said, sitting on a queen-size bed in the couple’s cramped apartment, located on the second story of her parents’ house, in Austin. “Maybe in fifth or sixth grade.” She received additional instruction in middle school as part of her probation for possession of marijuana. But certain details were still unclear; for instance, she had the mistaken notion that condoms would not help protect her from HIV.
“I learned what gonorrhea and chlamydia look like,” she told me. “The teachers didn’t say if there were cures. I think there were some STDs they wouldn’t talk about.” She didn’t recall any official discussions about pregnancy in her school. Most of what she knew she learned from her teenage girlfriends, the majority of whom were already mothers.
Monica’s situation is more common in Texas than in any other state. Texas ranks number one in teenage births, which, all told, cost taxpayers at least $1 billion a year. (Twenty-four percent of those births are not the girl’s first delivery.) While the number of teenage births in Texas is actually going down of late, it is decreasing at a slower rate than the nation’s at large. And 52.5 percent of Texas teens are having sex, compared with the national average of 47 percent. Rates of HIV/AIDS infection among teens are currently on the rise. Texas ranks fifth in teenage pregnancy (a number even more disconcerting in light of the fact that the U.S. ranks near the top in this category among developed nations).
To confront these challenges, Texas has become a leader in abstinence education. Thanks in part to the efforts of powerful advocates, from George W. Bush to the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH), based in Austin, the state has endorsed abstinence education as its primary agent to combat teenage sexual activity. Texas now gets more money through Title V, a stream of federal funding for abstinence programs, than any other state, more than $4.5 million a year. The Texas Education Code, written by the Legislature, lists directives with regard to sex education. One states that in the classroom, abstinence must be given more attention than any other approach; another requires that it be presented as the only method that is 100 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, STDs, HIV/AIDS, and the “emotional trauma associated with adolescent sexual activity.” These two directives haven’t been terribly controversial. Whether “emotional trauma” results from adolescent sexual activity is debated (studies suggest that activity is a consequence—not a cause—of mental health problems), but critics rarely belabor this point. Health care workers agree that it would be good if teenagers remained virgins.
More problematic is what isn’t taught. No law mandates that methods of contraception be included in sex ed classes, and nowhere in the code is condom instruction encouraged. Teachers in Texas who do promote condom use must cite “actual use” rates of condom effectiveness, not theoretical rates (more on that later). Only one of the four state-approved high school student health textbooks uses the word “condom,” and that book reaches only a small percentage of the Texas market. Because the language of the code does not insist on condom instruction, schools are free to leave it out. Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston who has been on the House Committee on Public Health since 1993, explained to me, “Abstinence-only wasn’t the intent of the legislation, but it de facto became that.”
“What I say we do is absent education,” said David C. Wiley, the president of the American School Health Association and a professor of health education at Texas State University. “I have never met anyone in all my fifty years that has ever had a comprehensive sex ed program in their schools—ever. We are raising generation after generation of sexually illiterate adults.”
And the situation is getting worse. Over the past thirty years, the age of the average female at the time of her first menstruation has decreased (about one month per decade), while the age of a person at the time of his or her first marriage has increased (by at least three years). At the same time, children are becoming sexualized earlier than ever before. Recently, Abercrombie & Fitch marketed thong underwear emblazoned with the phrases “wink, wink” and “eye candy” for “tweens”—consumer marketing—ese for seven- to twelve-year-olds. Kids trying to navigate this terrain want to hear from their parents about sex, but only about half of them do. More often, they pick up their information (and misinformation) from magazines, television, the Internet, and their peers. Without a sex ed curriculum in the classroom that works, these kids, and the taxpayers who end up footing the bill for their mistakes, are extremely vulnerable.
In the next decade, teenage mothers like Monica will become even more typical. Projecting a change in racial and ethnic composition and an increase in the teenage population, the Texas Department of State Health Services anticipates “serious implications for the patterns and trends in adolescent pregnancy.” As the crisis worsens, local school boards will become desperate for solutions to prevent teen pregnancy and disease. Proponents of abstinence programs claim that they have the answer; those who support comprehensive sex ed fundamentally disagree. The question is, What works?
The Texas State Board of Education adopts new health textbooks every eight to ten years. Since the content of these books pretty well dictates what happens in the classroom, the process of textbook adoption has historically been contentious. To better understand why, in 2008, the vast majority of Texas teens will not see the word “condom” in their textbooks, we need to go back to the 1994 health textbook debates. Back then the state board still had a great deal of power in the process and could edit textbooks at will (in 1995 the Legislature took this power away). Items some of the members deemed objectionable for the eyes of children included an image of a woman with a briefcase in her hand and a toddler looking up at her. Line drawings illustrating breast and testicular self-exams were considered too explicit. The board asked at least one publisher to erase the clitoris from a drawing of the female anatomy and reduce the size of the penis in a drawing of the male anatomy, prompting Lorena Bobbitt jokes.
Those who did not vote with the small but vocal ultraconservative faction faced swift and extreme retaliation. Patsy Johnson, a Democratic board member from 1992 to 1994, remembers that a few days before meetings, her husband’s office, where she worked, would be paralyzed by a flood of angry letters. “We’d have boxloads of mail and faxes saying, ‘Mrs. Johnson is for condoms, vaginal, anal, oral’—awful stuff,” she said. “I’m a traditional Methodist lady!”
Board members are unpaid. But electoral contests grew so heated in the mid-nineties that you would have thought a seat was something prestigious. The fifteen board members are elected officials with four-year terms who represent areas larger than congressional districts. Incumbents are traditionally difficult to unseat, but in the mid-nineties, members such as Johnson, who campaigned on shoestring budgets, found themselves attacked from the right by candidates with funding from wealthy San Antonio doctor James Leininger, whose deep pockets offered considerable resources for persuasion mail and TV ads. In the same wave of conservatism that ushered in Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution, Johnson and other incumbents less friendly to the conservatives were overcome. One mailer used to defeat her and at least one other board member depicted two men kissing. The accompanying text read, “This is just an example of the materials the current majority of the State Board of Education wants your children to read.” The mailer went on to explain that the image on the mailer was from a handout available at a clinic listed as a resource in four of the health textbooks that Johnson and others had approved, but the damage had been done.
Though the board was not scheduled to adopt new health textbooks for another decade, in the intervening years, increasing numbers of more-conservative members were voted onto the board, and Republicans were quietly encouraged by the most conservative members to vote in a bloc. Cynthia A. Thornton, a Republican and a teacher with 31 years of experience in high school classrooms, prided herself as an independent thinker. (“This is how naive I was: I thought most of the board would be educators. I sat between two dentists,” she told me. “I have a master’s degree in curriculum instruction. Some of these folks didn’t even have a college degree.”) Despite her qualifications, the far-right members reprimanded her for resisting their pressure. Gradually, the coercion became more overt. In one instance, a member of the board grabbed her and threatened her. (She would not give his name but said he was a fellow Republican.) Afterward, at Thornton’s request, an armed Capitol guard was in the room for all board meetings, and Thornton regularly received an escort to her car.
While this drama has subsided since 1994, unease with the growing number of radical board members has intensified. Some Republican members, like Patricia Hardy, found it necessary in our conversations to distinguish themselves from the pack. “I’m as far-right as you can be and still be normal,” Hardy said. Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, a Republican who has been a board member since 1984, took some time to choose her words before telling me that she was “concerned about the board’s direction.”
