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Critics Say Sex Ed Ineffective In Myriad Of Ways
By Bradley Vasoli, The Bulletin
Southampton — At a presentation of the Philadelphia Natural Family Planning Network (PNFPN) Saturday at Our Lady of Good Council Trinity parish, parents, students and others got a multifaceted view of sex as the young commonly learn about it.
Speakers at the PNFPN conference sought to paint a vivid and not entirely reassuring picture of the lessons young people glean from the media, their peers and their schools about the correct parameters of sexual behavior. The present environment isn’t usually one in which their approach has the upper hand.
“We are in a war,” Judy Neeld, director of the Oreland-based Generation Life, told the audience. “We are in a cultural battle right now.”
She described a culture so sexualized that a female acquaintance, watching the series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” with her daughter, counted the word “sex” uttered 18 times from start to first commercial.
The results of a social atmosphere that treats sex as properly overt and (with the use of birth control) perfectly safe can be seen in the statistics on abortions and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), Mrs. Neeld said. Four thousand abortions take place daily in America, while one in five Americans has an incurable STD.
She then turned her attention to chastity, a lifestyle that assigns sexual activity to marriage and that she views as the most effective for the happiness of both the married and unmarried. But, as demonstrated by the press treatment of a Johns Hopkins University study of teenagers who pledged to remain virgins until wedlock, she and other chastity advocates face a rough public-relations battle.
“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” read a headline by CBS News. “Virginity Pledges Don’t Mean Much,” read another by CNN. These networks and various print outlets described the study as having shown that teens taking these pledges don’t have a better record of pre-marital abstinence than do those who don’t take them.
But the study revealed something Mrs. Neeld found much more germane to the value chastity. The study only compared the behavior of deeply religious young people to that of other similarly devout youngsters, both about equally unlikely to engage in non-marital sex. But when both groups were contrasted with teens at large, the religious kids had less premarital sex, fewer STDs and fewer out-of-wedlock births.
Mrs. Neeld’s conclusion was simple: “Conservative and religious values matter in the home.”
Cristina Barba, college coordinator for Generation Life, offered some statistics calling contraceptive or “safe-sex” methods into question. For those under the age of 21, she said, condoms fail 23 percent of the time, while birth-control pills have a 13 percent failure rate for that age group.
“These are really high statistics,” she said.
Reliance on birth control, said Michael J. New, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, also has implications for the abortion rate. Many students who learn that they can engage in sexual activity without worry, he said, find themselves too willing to obtain abortions if they do become pregnant. As a result, abortion rates often rise in tandem with the use of contraceptives.
“Since no contraceptive is always effective, abortion is automatically the fallback,” he said.
On rare occasion, as listeners learned later, the message of chastity comes from those who once occupied the trenches of the sexually liberal popular media. Dawn Eden, a renowned former rock-music historian and journalist, shared with attendees the story of her shift from secular reviewer and news writer to devoutly Catholic proponent of chastity. It culminated in her firing from the New York Post, for the traditionalist editing she gave to stories on pornography and in-vitro fertilization.
After praying to St. Maximilian of Auschwitz, she came to view that turn of events as largely positive, going on to discuss her views on chastity with audiences of young people inside and outside of the United States.
For those with an understanding of scripture, she said, the outlook on such contemporary issues as chastity and abortion can sometimes be grim, but it ought, in the end, to be bright.
Her experience in the media and her religious conversion, she said, “helped me to have a better understanding that this is an ongoing battle — the culture of life against the culture of death. And we are not promised that we will see victory in this life. But we’ve read the Book and we know how the story ends.”
Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us
Speakers at the PNFPN conference sought to paint a vivid and not entirely reassuring picture of the lessons young people glean from the media, their peers and their schools about the correct parameters of sexual behavior. The present environment isn’t usually one in which their approach has the upper hand.
“We are in a war,” Judy Neeld, director of the Oreland-based Generation Life, told the audience. “We are in a cultural battle right now.”
She described a culture so sexualized that a female acquaintance, watching the series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” with her daughter, counted the word “sex” uttered 18 times from start to first commercial.
The results of a social atmosphere that treats sex as properly overt and (with the use of birth control) perfectly safe can be seen in the statistics on abortions and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), Mrs. Neeld said. Four thousand abortions take place daily in America, while one in five Americans has an incurable STD.
She then turned her attention to chastity, a lifestyle that assigns sexual activity to marriage and that she views as the most effective for the happiness of both the married and unmarried. But, as demonstrated by the press treatment of a Johns Hopkins University study of teenagers who pledged to remain virgins until wedlock, she and other chastity advocates face a rough public-relations battle.
“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” read a headline by CBS News. “Virginity Pledges Don’t Mean Much,” read another by CNN. These networks and various print outlets described the study as having shown that teens taking these pledges don’t have a better record of pre-marital abstinence than do those who don’t take them.
But the study revealed something Mrs. Neeld found much more germane to the value chastity. The study only compared the behavior of deeply religious young people to that of other similarly devout youngsters, both about equally unlikely to engage in non-marital sex. But when both groups were contrasted with teens at large, the religious kids had less premarital sex, fewer STDs and fewer out-of-wedlock births.
Mrs. Neeld’s conclusion was simple: “Conservative and religious values matter in the home.”
Cristina Barba, college coordinator for Generation Life, offered some statistics calling contraceptive or “safe-sex” methods into question. For those under the age of 21, she said, condoms fail 23 percent of the time, while birth-control pills have a 13 percent failure rate for that age group.
“These are really high statistics,” she said.
Reliance on birth control, said Michael J. New, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, also has implications for the abortion rate. Many students who learn that they can engage in sexual activity without worry, he said, find themselves too willing to obtain abortions if they do become pregnant. As a result, abortion rates often rise in tandem with the use of contraceptives.
“Since no contraceptive is always effective, abortion is automatically the fallback,” he said.
On rare occasion, as listeners learned later, the message of chastity comes from those who once occupied the trenches of the sexually liberal popular media. Dawn Eden, a renowned former rock-music historian and journalist, shared with attendees the story of her shift from secular reviewer and news writer to devoutly Catholic proponent of chastity. It culminated in her firing from the New York Post, for the traditionalist editing she gave to stories on pornography and in-vitro fertilization.
After praying to St. Maximilian of Auschwitz, she came to view that turn of events as largely positive, going on to discuss her views on chastity with audiences of young people inside and outside of the United States.
For those with an understanding of scripture, she said, the outlook on such contemporary issues as chastity and abortion can sometimes be grim, but it ought, in the end, to be bright.
Her experience in the media and her religious conversion, she said, “helped me to have a better understanding that this is an ongoing battle — the culture of life against the culture of death. And we are not promised that we will see victory in this life. But we’ve read the Book and we know how the story ends.”
Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us
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