“The difficulty in life is the choice.”
George Moore
New Hampshire law directs schools to preach abstinence from drugs and from sexual activity as the only way to avoid contracting HIV-AIDS. In his recent defense of this policy, Board of Education Chairman, Ovide Lamontagne, appears as unwilling to confront the realities of teenage behavior as the state law.
For more than two centuries, New Hampshire schools have stressed a Judeo-Christian pro-chastity message of sexual abstinence and, in more recent eras, the dangers of substance abuse. Nevertheless, teenage pregnancies, sexual transmitted diseases (STDs), smoking, alcohol abuse and illicit drug experimentation and use remain a common and growing phenomenon.
Sanitized sex and health education courses, stressing the state’s abstinence message, covered the sexual plumbing of males and females and were reinforced by a variety of scare-tactic lessons on the physiological and psychological risks of unwanted pregnancies and substance use/abuse.
In spite of such instruction and propaganda, New Hampshire’s teens, intoxicated with adolescent feelings of invincibility and hormonal change have evidenced little, if any, behavioral change.
Smoking and drinking remained widespread and difficult to control. Drug usage, STDs and teen pregnancies were generally hushed up, only whispered about as word filtered through a community.
Had it not been for the HIV-AIDS crisis, this scenario would have likely continued. There would have been little public alarm, other than the occasional outage after some drunken young totaled a car, themselves and possibly a friend or two into a tree or another vehicle.
However, as the first reports of New Hampshire teens testing HIV positive began to surface, concern mounted. Unlike scourges of the past, HIV was not a temporary condition. Adolescents testing positive for HIV eventually contract AIDS and subsequently die! Even the die-hard, anti-sex education crowd understood society could no longer afford to restrict access to information on how to avoid AIDS.
Politicians, educators and parents met and debated policy approaches. When all was said and done, the breadth of anatomical information dispensed to students was expanded, as were discussions on previously forbidden topics, including homosexual life styles. Still, the state’s primary solution remained constant … abstinence!
Supporters of this traditional approach are quick to point to isolated examples like Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital Medical Center Postponing Sexual Involvement (PSI) program. The brainchild of Drs. Reginald Tsang and Joseph Rauh, PSI has had limited success in creating a teen peer system to encourage young people to defer sexual activities and stress the message, “I can postpone sex and still be cool!”
Unfortunately, such bright spots are rare. One-quarter of all girls and an third of all boys are sexually active by 15. Of those sexually active teenagers, nearly one half have had multiple partners. More than one million girls under twenty become pregnant each year. STDs continue to spread in epidemic proportions as do the number of young people testing HIV positive.
Causes for the increase in sexual activity among young people are diverse. Most obvious are the not-so-subtle sexual messages which permeate our television shows, movies, books, advertisements and popular music … reflecting and reinforcing a more permissive public attitude toward sexual morality than in the past.
While arguably such conditions might be changed, the underlying problem is far more complex. Vastly improved health and nutrition have lowered the average of sexual maturity. Concurrently, with people marrying later, single individuals have more peak years of sexual maturity prior to marriage. With more latchkey children in our society, time for sexual experimentation is no longer at a premium for many young people. And, for many teens from socially and economically disadvantaged environments, the pleasures derived from sex and drug experimentation provide temporary escapes from their perceived hopelessness.
The virtues of sexual abstinence can, and should, be part of all human sexuality courses. But, it is also imperative compete information be provided, fully informing the vast majority of adolescents who will not abstain from sexual activity on the most effective ways to avoid STDs, pregnancies and HIV-AIDS. Adolescents must understand the magnitude of the choices they’ll face and that the decisions they’ll make are in their hands … as will be the consequences of those decisions, which can be fatal!
Tragically, both our state laws and Chairman Lamontagne are out of date and out of touch. Their “abstinence only” message must be modified. Pious moralizing will not make these problems disappear nor save lives!
