Teen Sex-Education Campaign Launched : Planned Parenthood Targets Youth, Parents and Three Networks’ Contraceptive-Ad Ban

The problem is epidemic--1.1 million pregnant teen-agers each year among a U.S. adolescent population of 29 million. Planned Parenthood president Faye Wattleton calls it “the single most important issue of the remaining years of the 20th Century.”

And the answer, she and other Planned Parenthood leaders are convinced, lies not in preaching the return to a morality of an earlier time but in making certain teens have ready access to both sex education and contraceptives.

“We are not going to be an organization promoting celibacy or chastity,” Wattleton said when the question was posed. “Our concern is not to convey ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots,’ but to help young people make responsible decisions about their sexual relationships.”

Comprehensive Campaign

To this end, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, convening here through the weekend, has unveiled plans for a comprehensive national advertising campaign, a $1-million initial effort to begin in November. It is targeted at teens, their parents, at lawmakers who make decisions on mandatory school sex education and, not incidentally, at the three major television networks, all of which ban ads for contraceptives.

“We’ve got to be more concerned about preventing teen pregnancies than we are about stopping sexual relationships,” said Wattleton, who is a master’s-degree R.N. with certification as a nurse-midwife.

The reality, she said in an interview, is that in 1986 sex among teens is “a given. I don’t think anyone with a rational mind is going to say that as of a given date there will be no more teen-age sexual activity.”

Statistics Cited

Planned Parenthood’s statistics seem to bear her out: 11 million of the nation’s 29 million adolescents are sexually active, 5 million of these girls. By age 19, eight in 10 males and seven in 10 females will have had intercourse. Forty percent of teen-age girls become pregnant at least once before they turn 20.

(The District of Columbia leads the nation with the highest teen-pregnancy rate, followed by Baltimore, Newark, Detroit and New York.)

Dr. Louise B. Tyrer, an obstetrician and gynecologist who is PPFA’s vice president for medical affairs, points a finger at parents who sidestep their responsibility as sex-education teachers: “There’s no doubt people in this country are very hung up about sex.”

She notes the irony that many adults who oppose sex education in the schools (a small minority, Planned Parenthood contends) also shirk the task at home. “I think,” Tyrer said, “they believe (youngsters) are supposed to be locked up sexually until they’re married, and then this magic world is supposed to open up. It just doesn’t happen that way.”

Planned Parenthood’s ads, to appear first as full pages in major newspapers and magazines (among these, Seventeen and, for fathers of teen-agers, magazines with strong male readership) don’t pull any punches. In one, a girl is saying, “He said if I didn’t do it, he wouldn’t love me anymore.” In another, a teen-age boy says, “Then I got this awful phone call.”

Another ad, an appeal to parents to communicate with their children about sex, leads off with a distraught-appearing father saying, “When I found my daughter’s birth control pills, I hit the ceiling.” (The ad campaign dovetails with another new Planned Parenthood campaign, POWER, an acronym for Parents Organized to Win Educational Rights, which hopes to mobilize support for sex education both in the home and in school.)

Several of the ads deal with what Planned Parenthood views as a double standard upheld by the major television networks, which present sexy programming while banning contraceptive commercials. One of these ads asks, “They did it 9,000 times on television last year. How come nobody got pregnant?”

The boys and girls in the Planned Parenthood ads are black, Latino and Caucasian. Black teens have twice as many pregnancies as white teens, Wattleton noted, “and the impact is much greater” in the black community. She points, though, to an increasing pregnancy rate among Latina and white girls, even as the rate for black girls is declining slightly.

More data: Most sexually active teens wait at least nine months after first intercourse before seeking contraceptive advice. Half of teen pregnancies occur within six months of initiating sexual activity. Only one-third of teens use birth control regularly; one-third never use it.

Why? “Teens are very ignorant about birth control,” Wattleton said. “They are not taught, quite simply. Misinformation and lack of information is really pervasive.” She added, “We do tend to be prudish on these issues.”

Idealistic View of Teens

Wattleton, herself the mother of an 11-year-old daughter, agreed with Tyrer that those who oppose birth control for teens have “an idealistic view of what life is for teen-agers in America. Not every teen-ager is off having sex day in and day out . . . (but) we tend to see our children as neutered, (as if) they have no sexual drive and they’re impervious to all the sexual conditioning that goes on in society every day.”

She emphasized that teens should be held responsible for their actions. But she sees little value in “rote” messages of sexual do’s and don’ts and believes that approach would only drive teens away from family-planning clinics.

In view of the 24 hours that typical teen-agers spend watching television a week, Wattleton finds it “unconscionable” that television bombards them with sexually suggestive images while, for the most part, failing to deal with possible consequences of sex.”

As for TV bans on contraceptive ads, she said, “Their concern is that contraception is controversial, and that it will ‘promote promiscuity.’ One is left to wonder how, if ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ do not promote promiscuity, and Jordache jeans and Obsession perfume do not promote promiscuity.”

She added, “Breaking the ban on contraceptive advertising could revolutionize thinking on contraceptive use in this country.”

Terming the networks’ position “indefensible,” Wattleton said, “They advertise for roach birth controls. Manufacturers of (contraceptive) products ought to have the same access.”

George Schweitzer, CBS vice president for communications, said of such ads, “We believe they would intrude on the moral and religious beliefs of many members of our audience. We agree that issues such as unintended pregnancies are important social issues, and they are not ignored in our broadcasts. They are covered in news and public affairs and in some entertainment programming, in a balanced context. The issue is one of context. In a commercial, it’s not balanced, it’s advocacy.”

Responding to suggestions that television presents sexually suggestive programming that ignores possible consequences of promiscuity, he said, “People watch these programs with their own predetermined set of values. When they watch ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Dallas,’ they know what to expect. You don’t know what the commercials are, but you sure know what to expect in the storyline or you wouldn’t be watching.” An NBC spokesman said, “It’s a longstanding policy based on a number of considerations. First, we avoid broadcasting material we believe would offend the moral or religious sensitivities of substantial segments of the audience. Also, the NBC television network must be responsive to our affiliate stations’ perception of their own communities’ needs and interests. Also, NBC questions whether a commercial message is an appropriate means for presenting discussion and information on a topic as complex as birth control.”

This conference has brought together 1,200 representatives of 187 Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide in 47 states, including California and the District of Columbia. Other priority topics for discussion include international family-planning assistance, violence directed at family-planning and abortion clinics and promotion of sex-education programs in the schools (only two states, Maryland and New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, mandate such programs).

One of Wattleton’s concerns is what she calls “bogus” clinics, set up by right-to-life advocates who advertise them as birth-control centers when in reality, she said, “they are designed to defraud and to mislead and to compel women to delay decisions (on abortion) until it is too late. They prey on the vulnerability of these women.”

Wattleton said these clinics are “springing up all over the country. They are now beginning to set themselves up close to high schools.” Planned Parenthood has taken legal action against several for misrepresentation; in Massachusetts a judge ruled that a facility, which was in the same building that housed Planned Parenthood and had put a “PP” on its door, would have to remove the initials or post a crucifix as well.

“We’re never out of the business of defending the right to legal abortion,” Wattleton said. (Nearly 30% of the 95,000 women who obtained abortions at Planned Parenthood centers last year were 19 or under.)

Planned Parenthood wants to know more about teen sexuality and, to find out, has commissioned a Louis Harris poll, not completed, of 1,000 teen-agers nationwide, with a heavy concentration of blacks and Latinos.

What is already known, from earlier surveys, is that 80% of all teen pregnancies are unintended, she said, and about 650,000 of these pregnancies result each year in births; the others are intentionally or spontaneously aborted. Indeed, family-planning programs have come under critical scrutiny by those who contend that they have for the most part succeeded only in curbing the birth rate, not the pregnancy rate.

(Planned Parenthood, the largest of the voluntary family-planning agencies, is based in New York with satellite offices in other cities, and has an annual budget of $240 million for its domestic and international programs, about half of it government funding. Its domestic caseload of clients each year is about 3 million.)

Dr. Louise Tyrer, a former Californian who took her medical residency in Los Angeles, is concerned that only a small fraction of the federal health budget, about $11 million, was committed last year to research and to development of new methods of birth control. “The litigation climate and the insurance crisis in this country has reached such proportions that it has been a great deterrent,” Tyrer said. Such research is vitally important, she added, because “maybe we can find some (methods) that have less side effects” and are “more acceptable” to more people.

Planned Parenthood advocates use of any birth control method that is both FDA-approved and appropriate for the individual, including the IUD. (Only one of these remains on the market, following problems of pelvic inflammatory disease and sterility.)

Planned Parenthood provides contraceptives, as well as health screenings and sex counseling, on an ability-to-pay basis at 700 family-planning centers, 45 of which also provide abortion services. “One of our biggest problems,” Tyrer said, “is that teens don’t like to go to a clinic and go through the hassle of a (pelvic) examination.” Rather, she said, they will get an over-the-counter barrier-type contraceptive at the drugstore but, used alone, any of these--the sponge, the condom or a foam--guarantee users that “at least once in every three years they’re going to end up with an unplanned pregnancy” (even the diaphragm has a first-year failure rate of 19%).

Tyrer says, “It would be much safer if cigarettes were on prescription and birth-control pills were in the dispensing machines.”

Planned Parenthood has identified teens at highest risk for becoming pregnant: those with mothers or sisters who became pregnant while teen-agers, those reared in single-parent homes, those who do not do well in school and seek self-esteem elsewhere.

Tyrer attributes the much lower teen-pregnancy rate in other Western societies to the fact that parents in those countries make children take responsibility for their actions from an early age, as well as to the openness with which other societies talk about sexuality and the ready availability of contraceptives to people of any age.

Wattleton likes to explode “myths” about teen pregnancy, and one of these myths, she said, is that teens want to become pregnant, that they just want someone to love. Emphasizing that 80% of teen pregnancies are unintended, she said, “this myth is right up there with the welfare-cheaters- riding-around-in-Cadillacs myth.”