This is what NC students learn in sex ed class. It’s not nearly enough | Opinion
In a scene from the iconic movie “Mean Girls,” the P.E. teacher offers a lesson in sex education.
Standing in front of a chalkboard, he warns the students, “At your age, you’re going to have a lot of urges,” he adds. “You’re going to want to take off your clothes, and touch each other. But if you do touch each other, you will get chlamydia, and die.”
It’s meant to be funny. But the sad truth is that sex education in many public schools isn’t a whole lot better than that.
North Carolina is among the many states that fail to provide students with truly comprehensive sex education, placing a disproportionate emphasis on abstinence and the dangers of premarital sexual activity.
Per state law, students learn about reproductive health and safety beginning in the seventh grade. While students do learn about contraception, the law requires they be taught that abstinence is the “expected standard for all school-age children,” and they are armed with strategies for avoiding sexual activity.
When people think of sex ed, they sometimes think of putting a condom on a banana. But even that doesn’t necessarily happen in North Carolina. Only 56% of schools across the state reported teaching students how to correctly use a condom, according to 2018 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For LGBTQ+ students, sex ed in North Carolina is unhelpful at best and blatantly discriminatory at worst. State law requires teaching students that a “mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual relationship in the context of marriage” is the best way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Really?
In some cases, the emphasis on abstinence borders on fear mongering and slut-shaming. For example, publicly available classroom materials from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teach students that if they abstain from sex, they are less likely to attempt suicide, and that “having multiple partners” is a negative outcome of choosing to have sex. Information from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction says that “being abstinent before marriage is good practice for being faithful within marriage.”
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting kids to refrain from sexual activity while they’re young. And it is true that the only way to ensure that you will never, ever contract an STD or become pregnant is to simply not have sex at all.
But that’s just not realistic. No matter how much you tell teenagers not to have sex, many of them are going to do it anyway. And studies show that programs that preach abstinence until marriage do not actually prevent young people from having sex, and it does little to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy and STDs.
Those who push for abstinence-only education are often the same people who want to reduce or ban abortions. But failing to properly educate young people about contraception does little to achieve that goal. While teenagers account for only a fraction of all abortions, a significant number of teenage pregnancies will result in abortion.
To be clear, parents should retain the power to decide when and how their children learn about sex — and they do. They always have had the right to opt out of sex ed, but the recently passed Parents’ Bill of Rights now dictates that parents must provide written consent before their child can participate in reproductive health and safety education programs.
It is possible to teach young people about safe sex without encouraging or enabling sexual behavior. They should know that abstinence is an option, and that it’s a choice that should always be respected. But telling them it is the only option — or the only safe and morally acceptable option — is neither objective nor fact-based.
This story was originally published September 10, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
