My university's official newspaper,
The Daily Texan, has been making a hard push (ahem) on all things pelvic of late. Most of this has
focused on either the Sonogram Bill in the Texas Legislature or the move by the House of Representatives to defund Planned Parenthood.
Fingers crossed. Today's exhibit turns now to
abstinence-only sex education--though they did manage to work in more teeth-gnashing over the state legislature's own move to defund Planned Parenthood.
There are two (and a half*) points which stand out to me form this particle editorial, each in its own way representative of the larger cuture's attitude:
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Quote:
"We support the legislation and TFN’s efforts because abstinence-only sexual education is not based on science...HB 1624 could not come at a more pressing time. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a law banning federal funding for Planned Parenthood. While the organization is most widely known for providing abortions, it actually spends much of its efforts and resources educating young people about reproductive health and distributing various forms of birth control. If the organization loses federal funding and is significantly weakened, then the state must step in and fulfill that responsibility. Similarly, with the Texas Legislature bent on restricting women’s legal right to abortion, the state must at least effectively educate its youth on the subject" (emphases mine).
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The first point is that abstinence-only education is not based on science. The second is that since Planned Parenthood can't give our children
comprehensive sex-education, therefore the state should do it.
To the first point, it is worth answering that abstinence-only sex education is in fact quite scientifically sound. It is a scientific fact that if you do not engage in sexual intercourse, you will neither conceive nor beget any children. If anything, the problem with abstinence-only sex education is that people often act in a way which is unscientific, in the sense that they know the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy is there, and they ignore that possibility. The science says, "If you have sex often enough, assuming that you are not sterile, then you will either get pregnant or impregnate someone else."
This goes for couples who contracept as well, since no contraception is 100% "foolproof." That is why, for example, Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute reports that the majority of women who come in for abortions were
using contraception when they got pregnant. This is
not especially surprising.
It is more accurate to say that abstinence-only sex education does not avail itself of the technology made possible by science. That is to say, it does not avail itself of the various forms of artificial birth control made available to us in this high-tech society. After all, natural fairly planning also relies on science--namely, the physiology of a woman's fertility cycle--to space children, but it does not rely on any technological advances. Rather, it relies on good old-fashioned self-control, in much the same way as does abstinence, as well as a bit of
communication and discernment between the spouses.
Thus, the requests for comprehensive sex-education courses are an appeal to use our technical knowledge to solve what is ultimately a moral problem. Why practice self-control (which is a sort of moral virtue which requires some amount of sacrifice) when you can practice "safe-sex" instead. The technology attempts to circumvent the consequences which are sited as some reasons against teens' (or really anyone's) fornicating.
In a related note is the second point: if Planned Parenthood** (or some other supposedly trustworthy organization) can't give our children sex-education, then clearly it must be the state's job to do it. This is another form of looking for a technical solution to a moral problem, albeit in a different form. The moral problem here is that some parents don't want to be bothered with raising their own children: this also takes time and sacrifice.The solution is to have somebody else step in and act as nanny: be it the state or some other entity. Anybody will do, so long as it's not the parents.
Of course, the "technology" employed here is a bit different than before, and the "science" is too: we rely on political and social sciences to create these entities to step in and raise our children. This way, there is no need for the parents to take responsibility in the matter. While we're at it, we can have the state policing everybody to make sure they take their birth control pills before turning them loose to "play." Rather than kicking the government out of the bedroom, we'll re-train it as our own certified birth-control inspector to ensure that Johnny put his condom on correctly and Susie took the right dosage of birth control pills before (or after) the two get together. What a brave new world this will make.
In the meantime, parents are dispensed from their responsibilities to educate their children--whether they want to be or not. With that dispensation comes a similar dispensations of setting a good example for said children. After all,
abstinence itself relies more-or-less on the virtue of chastity, which can be (and is) modeled to the children by their parents. If Johnny's mother and father can enjoy consequence-free sex with each other, then why is it different for Johnny and his girlfriend? Especially since Johnny will almost inevitably discover the artificial birth control methods at some point. Moreover, if Johnny's parents can get divorced--and then remarried to different partners soon thereafter--then what exactly was
so special about that marriage which makes it o.k. to enjoy intercourse within the bounds of marriage, but not without those bounds? In a word, nothing.
The comprehensive sex-education is therefore also an attempt to find a technical solution to a moral problem. Abstinence-only education, on the other hand, is ultimately an incomplete moral solution to a moral problem: perhaps better than the technical solution from a moral standpoint, though still a far cry from being the whole solution. The proponents of the comprehensive sex education are therefore right to point out that abstinence only sex education is not the whole solution to the problem; unfortunately, their solution is not right, either, and if it is better from a purely technical or consequentialist point of view--which is debatable--then it is worse from a moral one. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away, whether that problem is the technical consequentialist problem of unwanted pregnancies and the spread of disease, or the moral problem presented by a culture which has rejected chastity in favor of fornication, adultery, contraception, and divorce.
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*The half-point is that Planned Parenthood is a great organization, if not because of the abortions, then at least despite them because of all of its other services. I won't waste any more time right now playing whack-a-mole with this particular (disingenuous) argument, other than to link to an
old post and to the comments made there by my friend Mr Nathanael Blake.
**Of course, since Planned Parenthood distributes the
least effective condoms available for use in birth control, why would anyone trust that they would do any better in their sex-education services?
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This was
originally posted on my
Equus Nom Veritas blog, and can be viewed there in its correct original format, complete with more supporting links.
Tags: Culture Marriage Culture-Wars Culture-of-Deat H Morality Scientism
