Sex Education Issues

During the 1960s, the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative organization, pushed schools to eliminate sex education programs in classrooms, charging that the classes were “smut,” “immoral,” and “a filthy communist plot” to poison the minds of American children. By the end of the 1970s, only the District of Columbia and three states—Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey—required that sex education be taught in public schools. The decline in sex education programs in the 1970s was accompanied by a steady increase in the teen sex rate and out-of-wedlock births. When the AIDS epidemic began to expand its reach into America’s schools in the 1980s, parents and educators decided that they needed to teach their children about the realities of sex and disease. By December 1997, nineteen states and the District of Columbia required schools to teach sexuality education, and thirty-four states and the District of Columbia required instruction about HIV, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

In the mid-1990s, teen sex and illegitimacy became a focus of concern for conservatives who were trying to reform the welfare system. They charged that the welfare system rewarded premarital sex and out-ofwedlock births by granting benefits to unwed mothers. The best way to reduce the welfare rolls, and therefore illegitimacy, they argued, was to emphasize abstinence-only sex education programs in schools. In 1996, Congress included in its welfare reform act a provision to encourage states to require abstinence-only sex education programs in their schools. Congress authorized grants of $250 million over five years to states that required school-based abstinence-only sex education programs. In addition, the five states that showed the largest drop in teen pregnancy without a corresponding increase in the abortion rate would split an additional $400 million.

The 1996 legislation is very specific about what the abstinence-only programs must and must not teach. Under the law,... [continues]

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