Abstinence Is Not the Only Option

Were Bill and Hillary virgins when they first met? Did they abstain from sex until the day they legally tied the knot? These questions may seem impertinent, but I wouldn’t be asking if the president hadn’t just announced a $250-million educational campaign urging sexual abstinence for unmarried folks.

Under guidelines for the new program drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services, abstaining from nonmarital sex “is the expected standard� of human behavior. So it is only natural that we look to the president for a role model. Is Bill Clinton truly convinced that sex outside of marriage “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects,� as his health department stated last week? If so, perhaps that warning should be posted on the wall in the Lincoln Bedroom in case some unmarried couples turn up.

Or is the abstinence message only intended for poorer people? Presumably that’s why it was mandated in the Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed last year. Although, to be fair to the president, he probably didn’t read the fine print, having entrusted the task of brokering the bill with the Republican congressional leadership to Dick Morris. Evidently, Morris is a strong advocate of abstinence--for poor people.

No matter; the president who promised to fix the “flawed� welfare law has rushed in to speedily implement one of its more absurd provisions. If the goal is to discourage the poor from having children, shouldn’t the new educational effort stress birth control? Unfortunately, information about the pill and condoms is precluded by the abstinence-only message required by the welfare law. Indeed, in order to qualify for the new federal dollars, states will have to drastically modify existing programs that have sex education and birth control components.

As it is, we do less than any industrial nation to seriously educate our young people about the risks of unprotected sex, which is why we have by far the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. Yet, instead of expanding birth control education, Clinton has bowed to the allies of the religious right in Congress and invoked abstinence as the only acceptable approach.

Now don’t get me wrong. Like Bill and Dick, I have nothing against urging other people to practice abstinence. However, it is starkly unrealistic to make a plea for virginity the focus of family planning efforts in a society where a majority of 18-year-olds--56% of girls and 73% of boys--already have crossed that line.

Like the welfare bill, this is posturing and not policy. Clinton played to the rhetoric of the fundamentalist right, which blames poverty on out-of-wedlock births while opposing sex education. This is dangerously simplistic given the fact that every country in northern Europe has a higher rate of out-of-wedlock birth, but far less poverty, than we do. But births to teenage mothers in Europe are less than half of the U.S. rate, thanks to extensive birth control education.

Finland, for example, has an out-of-wedlock birthrate of more than 60%, but only 2.5% of its children live in poverty, compared with 21.5% in the U.S. And despite a culture that can best be described as anti-abstinence, Finland has one of the best records in the world in reducing teenage pregnancy and limiting sexually transmitted diseases.

These beneficial results are due to progressive social welfare programs, including explicit sex education, which very much increases the odds that children will be born healthy and to those who are prepared to care for them, legally married or not.

Upon turning 15, every student in Finland receives in the mail a detailed packet containing information about sex, birth control and the responsibilities of parenthood, as well as a condom with instructions on how to use it. In the lobby of the Finnish Ministry of Health, there is a large bowl offering visitors free condoms. It is a symbolic gesture that recognizes that while sex is a fact of life, unwanted children need not be.

The effectiveness of sex education has been demonstrated throughout the industrial world. But to substitute the slogan of abstinence for serious sex education is a denial of the power of human sexuality, which, unfortunately, begins with the raging and often irrepressible hormones of adolescence.

Odd that Clinton should need lectures that sex is here to stay. If now, with the inflamed conviction of a recent convert, he seeks to lead a crusade to curtail sexual appetites, I wish him luck. But premarital sex is the norm in American life, and an educational campaign that makes abstinence the only acceptable means of birth control is destined to become nothing but a lame joke.