The Sex Education Debate Continues

“My birth control didn’t work,” a teenage girl facing her second pregnancy recently told Melanie Berryman, who runs the teen parent support group at a rural northeastern Georgia county high school.

This is the kind of thing that Berryman hears often and illustrates how access to birth control cannot successfully take the place of comprehensive sex education programs.

The sex education debate is no longer about whether sex education should be taught in schools, reports National Public Radio. A 2004 poll conducted by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that only seven percent of Americans say sex education should not be part of the public school curriculum.

The present debate is whether the curriculum should be ‘abstinence-only’ or ‘abstinence-plus’. Abstinence-plus programs recognize that not all teens abstain from sex, educating students about methods of effective birth control in addition to encouraging abstinence as a healthy life-choice.

Although nine out of 10 residents from Berryman’s county believe that if teens are sexually active they should use birth control, the school relies on an abstinence-only program. “Birth-control methods are not part of the curriculum,” said Pamela Smith, nurse-manager at the local health department. Condoms are discussed, but only in the context of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, not pregnancy, she said.

Pregnancy rates among Georgia’s adolescent females are among the highest in the country. Although their sex education programs are better than they used to be, agree Smith and Berryman, statistics released at the end of 2008 by Georgia KIDS COUNT reveal that the birth rate in their county for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 is about 6 per hundred, which is slightly higher than the statewide rate.

While Smith and Berryman continue to push for the implementation of more comprehensive sex education curriculums, they are also working with organizations outside public schools. Both are members of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition, an advocacy group that is kicking off a new program called ParentTalk. The program, funded by state grant money, aims to educate parents on how to talk to their teens about adolescent health, including issues like STDs and pregnancy.

ParentTalk is largely community-based. “We have to be careful about what we hand out during schools hours,” Smith said. The program will instead focus on increasing awareness about the Teen Matters Clinic, a full service health clinic for youth between the ages of 11 and 19, and developing parent-led groups around the community that will allow for more freedom in developing comprehensive sex education programming.

With more comprehensive programming, teens like the ones Berryman works with in the parent support group may learn to more effectively use the birth control methods to which they already have access.