Sex Ed Mandates and Children’s Innocence

by Greg Pfundstein
August 17, 2011

New York’s new sex education mandate excludes abstinence-only options and forces all city school children to learn about “safe sex” in the sixth and seventh grades.

Imagine your 9th-grade daughter coming home from school one day and announcing that she has to go to a local reproductive health clinic: Planned Parenthood, say, or Choices Women’s Medical Center. She has to fill out a form indicating the clinic’s address, phone number, and hours, and noting whether the clinic offers birth control, pregnancy tests, emergency contraception, prenatal care, and sterilization. She will have to find out what it costs to have a consultation about birth control and write down the clinic’s confidentiality policy. Finally, she will have to map out the bus, train, or walking route she would use to get to the clinic. Not the route from home, mind you, but the route from school. This is your daughter’s homework.

This dystopian future is now. Many New York City children are already completing this outrageous assignment every year as part of the Reducing the Risk sex education program recommended by the NYC Department of Education. The program, currently offered at the discretion of the principal of each school, is in use in somewhere between 60% and 80% of schools. But starting next year, it will become even more common, thanks to a new mandate from the Bloomberg administration that every school teach a semester of sex education in 6th or 7th grade and another in 9th or 10th grade.

The new mandate requires that the curriculum teach kids how to use condoms. But the recommended Reducing the Risk program does much more than that: another homework activity involves a shopping trip to a local condom vendor to list the brand names of the condoms sold there and to indicate whether they are lubricated or not, reservoir or plain. The program mocks common sense and the wishes of the majority of parents by asking these fourteen-year-old students to decide which method of preventing pregnancy “seems best for you.” Here we find abstinence listed along with condoms; foam, jelly, cream; condoms plus another method; birth control pill; birth control patch or ring; Depo Provera; Implanon; and IUD. Most parents have a pretty clear idea of what “seems best” for their 9th-grade children. the rest