Revolving Around Religion: Abstinence Education in American Schools
Jessica D. Zietz
I. Introduction
Over the past four decades, Christian conservatives have waged war on sex education. In an effort to revert America back to traditional ideals of marriage, gender, and sexuality, these activists have fought to replace comprehensive sex education with a system that teaches abstinence as the only moral option for all unmarried persons.
The rise of abstinence education presents a modern day example of the Galileo story. Despite overwhelming evidence that comprehensive sex education is the most effective approach for teenagers, a small, religious minority has succeeded in implementing abstinence policies in half of public schools. Parental voices are ignored, real science labeled junk. While not an explicit focus like it was in Galileo’s time, religion is implicitly used as a justification for policy decisions in secular schools. A population undoubtedly in need of truthful information is lied to under the guise of protection. These recurring themes present a world not so different from Galileo’s.
Part II of this Article traces the history, implementation of, and challenges to abstinence education. Part III examines the misleading, inaccurate, and limited content of abstinence curricula. Part IV discusses the topic’s relation to the Galileo dilemma, observing both similarities and differences. Part V provides an update on the current status of abstinence education in America. Part VI briefly concludes.
II. The Rise of Abstinence Education in America
A.Historical Background
The introduction of sex education in schools can be traced to the 1960s and ‘70s. Baby boomers became young adults, “swelling the ranks of what would come to be called the youth culture [and making] teenage sexuality . . . a subject of widespread concern.”[1] The Supreme Court had, in 1957, ruled that sexually explicit material was not synonymously obscene;[2]movie producers, meanwhile,took up fights against production codes that banned nude silhouettes and scenes of childbirth.[3] Rock ‘n’ roll exploded into pop culture, and became “unabashedly sexual.”[4] The arrival of the birth control pill, combined with “liberalization of contraception and abortion laws” in the 1960s and early 1970s,enabled adult women to become sexually active while avoiding pregnancy. But during this same time period, unwanted pregnancies among unwed teenage women increased.[5]
Congress responded to the rise in teen pregnancy in part by adding Title X to the Public Health Service Act, providing funds for family planning services and education. Furthermore, in 1964, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) was founded “to provide education and information about sexuality and sexual and reproductive health.”[6] The organization sought to develop comprehensive sex education curricula and help schools implement them.[7] The federal government, however, did not press for sex education in public schools. Instead, many schools implemented these programs on their own or with the help of groups like SIECUS. The content was straightforward, focusing mostly on “physical and sexual development, sexually transmitted disease prevention, and contraceptive use.”[8] While the curricula were competently designed to address very real problems, schools and SIECUS were met with fervent opposition by Christian conservatives, and, in particular, Evangelical Christians. Evangelicals are“much more inclined than the general population to believe premarital sex [is] immoral. . . . [and] leads to harmful psychological and emotional consequences for the unwed compared to other Americans.”[9] Conservative groups fought against sex education, contending it violated parental rights and subverted Christian morality. However, by the 1980s, these groups realized that their push to eliminate sex education was futile. The advent of the AIDS epidemic made it especially difficult to argue that youths should be taught absolutely nothing about sex.[10] Rather than give up altogether, Christian conservatives decided to fight to overhaul the content of sex education.[11] Thus, the focus was shifted from elimination to replacement, and abstinence-only education was born.
B. Stealth Strategies
Abstinence education supporters adopted surreptitious tactics in their fight to restructure sex-education. In The Politics of Virginity, a book detailing abstinence education in America, the authors deemed this practice “stealth tactics in morality policy.”[12] Morality policies are those that “tend to address such issues as gay marriage, abortion, and like policy areas where the locus of the conflict is moral, not material. Advocates of morality policies wish to create change, largely through moral persuasion and policies regulation behavior.”[13] Morality policies simplify a debate by painting it as a simple question of right versus wrong; labeling opponents morally wrong leaves little room for compromise or discussion. In the abstinence context, sex before marriage is considered by Christian conservatives to be immoral and detrimental to society; any teaching of contraception thereforecondones moral ills.
Stealth morality policy, in particular, aims “to allow an unpopular policy, or a policy supported by a well-organized minority, to be passed legislatively without having to undergo much legislative debate or public scrutiny.”[14] To this end, furtive tactics are employed. For example, provisions for abstinence funding have been added into unrelated bills at the eleventh hour, with no debate or publicity.[15] Additionally, recognizing that the content of many sex education programs is decided at the local level, Christian conservatives have run for school board positions. However, they normally did not disclose their status as Christian conservatives or their abstinence agenda until after their elections.[16]By using these and other stealth tactics, Christian conservatives have succeeded in securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for factually inaccurate programs that most Americans simply do not support.
C. Legislative Victories
i.The Moral Majority
After switching their focus to content replacement, abstinence education supporters tirelessly lobbied politicians and gained support for their agenda. One author speculated that Christian conservatives’ vault to political influence was a result of a heavy organization around sexual issues, such as abortion, “sexual explicitness in the media, and opposition to feminism and gay rights.” The legalization of abortion, in particular, unified “a range of secular conservatives and religious groups on the Right” and gave their platform new prominence.
ii.The Adolescent Family Life Act
Christian conservatives claimed their first victory in 1981 when the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA)[17] replaced the Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention Care Act. The bill was carefully designed to attract bipartisan support; it included as a compromise “a statute that designated the bulk of the money . . . to support services for pregnant and parenting teens.”[18]AFLA was “quietly” included in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 and signed into law “without drawing hearings or floor votes.”[19] Title X continued to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in funding; in a sense, AFLA was viewed as a “trade-off so that conservatives would not slash Title X . . . .”[20]
After its passage, AFLA conspicuously promoted chastity and morality, and tried to shift focus away from contraception as a solution to teen pregnancy. In its original form, the lawmandated that “groups seeking funding involve religious groups in their implementation of the abstinence-only programs.”[21]Such provisions became the subject of legal challenges.[22]However, AFLA funds continued to support programs that
“expressed Catholic or evangelical doctrine and routinely distorted medical information.”[23] Unfortunately for AFLA supporters, Congress failed to provide significant funds for the law. In 1982, for example, AFLA received just $10.9 million, which paled in comparison to the sums Title X received.[24] It was clear to Christian conservatives that further action was needed.
iii. The Welfare Reform Act and Title V
Legislatively, the most significant development for abstinence education came with the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Christian conservatives strongly opposed welfare, arguing that it “undermined the traditional family by contributing to the rise in female, single-headed households.”[25] If young women could be depend on government support, they reasoned, a husband was no longer a necessity. President Clinton promised welfare reform through a focus on job training and assistance with necessities such as child care; conservatives, on the other hand, aimed to “reduce federal spending through a variety of radical measures,” including “prohibiting the allocation of welfare checks to children born to unwed teenage mothers. . . .”[26] When Republicans retook the House of Representatives in 1996, they “cast welfare as the root cause of dysfunctional families” and sought to “compassionately” eliminate the path to this destruction.[27] The GOP’s bill was debated extensively; however, “abstinence-only education was never presented to Congress, or the general public, as a solution to illegitimacy, poverty, or welfare abuse.”[28] Instead, conservatives used stealth tactics to include funding for an abstinence education program, labeled Title V, in the miscellaneous provisions of the final bill.[29] President Clinton signed the bill into law, while noting that “serious problems remain[ed] in the non-welfare provisions of the bill.”[30]As a result, from 1997–2006, Title V received $875 million in federal funding.[31]
iv.Community-Based Abstinence Education
Although Title V represented a major victory for abstinence supporters, it allowed states leeway in crafting curricula and required only that “recipients not use messages inconsistent with the federal definition of abstinence-only education . . . .”[32] This wasn’t strict enough for Christian conservatives who wanted to carefully monitor the content of sex education programs. Thus, in 2000, President George W. Bush established Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE). The program allowed for funding of both private (often religious) and public entities. Unlike Title V, receipt of CBAE funds was contingent on participants adhering exactly to eight government-mandated criteria.[33] For example, groups and schools receiving CBAE monies had to teach that abstinence “is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy [and] sexually transmitted diseases,” “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” and “ that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”[34] Recipients also had to agree to not provide any other forms of sex education in the same setting.[35] Thus, schools could not accept CBAE funds and then teach both abstinence and contraception. Funding for CBAE grew drastically over the years; the program went from receiving $20 million in 2001 to $137 million in 2006.[36]
E.Legal Challenges
Legal scholars have argued that abstinence-only education violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.[37] There have been only a few legal challenges to abstinence education; however, the topic has made it to the Supreme Court. In Bowen v. Kendrick,[38] the Court found that AFLA did not, on its face, violate the Establishment Clause.[39] Reversing a decision by the district court, the Court held that AFLA had a valid secular purpose, i.e., mitigating the social and economic consequences of teen sexual activity. The Court also found that AFLA did not have the effect of advancing religion, while noting that the program’s approach “may coincide with the approach taken by certain religions.” After looking at the specific application of AFLA, however, the Court remanded the case with orders for the district court to determine whether AFLA was being used to fund religious activities in secular settings. Eventually, the parties “reached a settlement establishing that AFLA-funded programs had to work to eliminate religious messages from their curricula, as well as to provide medically accurate information.”[40]
Subsequent cases challenging abstinence curricula and programs have resulted in findings that the texts disseminate religious teachings,[41] promote religion,[42]and mix religious activity with federally-funded activity.[43] None of this, however, appears to have deterred abstinence advocates.
III. Content of Abstinence Teachings
A. Types of Sex Education
There are three primary types of sex education in the United States. Comprehensive sex education, the least common method, teaches “a broad curriculum that incorporates sexual development and physiology, reproductive health,” pregnancy, STD prevention, and birth control methods that include abstinence.[44] Abstinence-based education also discusses reproductive health issues, and provides a limited discussion on birth control methods and condom usage.[45] Abstinence-only education, on the other hand, “either bans communication about contraception or allows it only in the framework of contraceptive failure rates.”[46]
It is important to reiterate that, despite hyperbole from abstinence supporters, all forms of sex education include lessons on abstinence. The difference, as noted by one scholar, is that abstinence education teaches abstinence as a moral value, while in comprehensive sex education, abstinence is simply a method of preventing “unwanted consequences of sex.”[47]
B. Problematic Content in Abstinence Curricula
Abstinence education has been criticized on a number of grounds. Among those are arguments that it is factually inaccurate, contains religious content that is inappropriate in public schools, paints women as the two extremes of virgin and whore, ignores homosexuality and racial minorities, and is ineffective in delaying sexual activity. I will address each of these issues in turn.
i. Factual Inaccuracies in Abstinence Teachings
Condoms cannot protect against STDs. Premarital sex will have devastating physical and emotional consequences. Birth control does not, in fact, prevent pregnancy. This is but a small sample of factual and medical inaccuracies preached to unknowing youths through abstinence education. Such misinformation is treated as scientific fact; students often have no way of knowing that the information is blatantly false or based on faulty research. For instance, one abstinence text states that “only 5 to 21 percent of couples use condoms consistently and correctly, and . . . even with correct usage, condoms do little to protect against disease.”[48] Using a condom, argues another text, “is like playing Russian Roulette. There is a greater risk of a condom failure than the bullet being in the chamber.”[49] This distortion of the efficacy of condoms “runs contrary to vast scientific research indicating the opposite: Consistent condom use is an effective method for reducing the risk of infection contraction and transmission.”[50] Hormonal contraceptives are given similar treatment; Sex Respect warns that “chemical forms of birth control damage the inside of a young girl’s body in ways that can affect her fertility later on, too.”[51]
As evidenced by the excerpts above, fear is used to deter teens from having sex. One Florida school board member declared that the school should “scare the hoo-hoo out of” teens.[52] Sex Respect declares that “there’s no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone”; SCF warns that sexual activity will lead to guilt, loss of reputation, even development of emotional illness. One text states bluntly that people who engage in premarital sex “will suffer and may even die . . . .”[53] Mentioning contraceptives only in terms of their failure rates furthers thesescare tactics. Worse, the negative treatment of contraceptives may dissuade teens from protecting themselves when they do have sex. Studies indicate that young adults are grossly misinformed on these issues; for example, “around 20 percent of teens do not think condoms are effective in preventing HIV/AIDS and STI transmission, and one in five teens erroneously believe birth control pills provide protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”[54]
When the bases for these claims are traced to their roots, the situation becomes even more disturbing. Questionable research methods are highlighted most clearly in one textbook’s discussion of abortion. The book, Sexuality, Commitment, and Family (SCF), states that pregnant women who choose abortion experience chronic grief, suicidal thoughts and attempts, heavy drinking, and nightmares.[55] Shockingly, it claims that women who terminate a pregnancy are more likely to abuse subsequent children. These claims have no scientific support. They are traced to a book on abortion written not by a scholar, doctor, or academic, but by a pro-life advocate. He came up with his “findings” by actively seeking out a small number of women who regretted their abortions. The women were “not representative of the general population of women who have had abortions, so basing a study on their perspectives does not yield unbiased information that can be used to make general claims about women who have had abortions.”[56] Yet the information is treated as scientific and unbiased, both in the original book and the textbook repeating the findings. Readers of SCF have no way of knowing where the information comes from or that it is misleading and unreliable. This is precisely the type of “research” used to support abstinence-only programs.
ii. Religious and Biblical Undertones