Sex Education and Teen Sex

Occassionally supporters of sex education will argue that such programs reduce teen sexual activity. But more often they strongly oppose the idea of suggesting that teens should abstain from sex outside marriage, as this would violate the "separation of church and state". Besides, they explain, teens are going to have sex regardless of what their parents or teachers tell them, so the only practical thing to do is to try to reduce the damage when they do have sex.

Does sex education result in more or less teen sexual activity? Even if it does not reduce the total activity, does it at least result in teens practicing more "safe sex"?

Planned Parenthood conducted a landmark study of this subject back in 1986. Planned Parenthood is, of course, one of the leading advocates of more and earlier and more explicit sex education, and so if their study is at all biased, it would surely be on the side of the benefits of sex education.

In reporting the results of their study, they pointed out that teens who had gone through what Planned Parenthood considered a "comprehensive" sex education program were significantly more likely to use birth control. Thus, they trumpeted, comprehensive sex education is a resounding success.

By the way: They defined "comprehensive" sex education as a program that included at least four of six categories: biology of reproduction, coping with sexual development, different types of birth control, preventing sexual abuse, abortion, and where to get contraceptives. As three of the six are abortion and birth control (note its mentioned twice), for a program to be labeled "comprehensive" it had to discuss birth control and/or abortion.

Assuming that the numbers they report in the "back of the book" are accurate, it is true that sex education does result in greater use of birth control. But a close examination of the numbers reveals that this does not mean what Planned Parenthood would like you to think it means.

Planned Parenthood reported the results of their study as follows:

Chart 1

	Had sex	No sex		Sex WITH birth control	Sex WITHOUT birth control
Total number of teens	350	600		160	168
Comprehensive sex ed	46%	31%		53%	40%
Non-comprehensive sex ed	19%	26%		18%	22%
No sex ed	34%	42%		28%	37%

This is an odd way to present the statistics, as it does not allow us to readily compare the sexual behavior of students who did and did not go through "comprehensive sex education". However, there is sufficient information here to allow us to compute the percentages in a different way. (For the mathematically inclined or those who question the accuracy of the following chart, I explain how I came up with this chart at the end of this article.)

Chart 2

	Comprehensive sex ed	Non-comprehensive sex ed	No sex ed
No sex	54%	70%	68%
Had sex	46%	30%	32%
Sex WITHOUT birth control	19%	17%	17%
Sex WITH birth control	24%	13%	12%
Sex, birth control unknown	3%	0%	3%

Note that the bottom section shows the percentage of the TOTAL teens who had sex and used birth control, not just the percentage of those who had sex.

Studying the data in this form reveals a couple of interesting facts:

• Teens who went through what Planned Parenthood considered "comprehensive sex education" -- i.e. a "good" program" -- were over 50% more likely to be sexually active. (From 30% to 46%.)
• These teens were almost twice as likely to engage in "safe sex" (from 13% to 24%). This agrees with Planned Parenthood's boasts.
• But ... they were still slightly MORE likely to engage in "unsafe sex" (17% versus 19%).

Of course, Planned Parenthood gets government grants to hand out contraceptives to teenagers. And, as the above study indicates, sex education is bringing them a lot of business.

Posted 16 Sep 2000.

Copyright 1995 by Ohio Right to Life
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