Facts About the Facts of Life

Some students in Santa Ana are anxious to sit down with school officials and have a talk about the facts of life. But in this case, it will be the students telling adults what they should know. School officials should listen. What they’ll be hearing is that the district’s sex education curriculum, which is based solely on abstinence, is just not working.

The students conducted their own survey and found that three out of five teenagers in the district acknowledge being sexually active. (That’s higher than the national average.) And about three out of four students believe the curriculum needs to be changed.

The 18-month study of fellow students’ sex habits was done by 15 teenagers in the Santa Ana Unified School District who were recruited by the Campfire USA Orange County Council Speak Out program. The survey was funded by a grant from the California Wellness Foundation, one of a dozen being sponsored in California promoting policies and education that will help prevent teenage pregnancy.

What should attract added interest from school officials is the backing students received from parents and teachers who were also surveyed. Nine out of 10 parents support student efforts to change the district’s program. So do a majority of health teachers, who agree that the sex education curriculum needs improving.

It’s no wonder, looking at some of the students’ responses. One 18-year-old with a 19-month-old child said she didn’t believe she could conceive the first time she had sex. The students who are sexually active realize that they should be using birth control, but the survey found that many don’t know how to obtain or use it.

All the Santa Ana district gives students now is basic physiological information. The program emphasizes abstinence and allows teachers to tell students where to find numbers of family planning clinics in the phone book. The student survey group wants the district to also provide information about preventing sexually transmitted diseases and how to get birth control pills or condoms.

Targeting Santa Ana was no accident. Historically the school district has had high teenage pregnancy rates. In 1996, a UC Berkeley study identified Santa Ana as one of seven “trouble spots” in Southern California for teenage births, with more than 8% of girls from 15 to 17-years-old having babies each year. And that’s just births.

The painful facts are that babies born to teenagers are more likely to die in their first year than those born to older women. The death rate for teenage mothers is also higher. Teenage pregnancies and childbirth are a major cause of students leaving school. That goes for teenage dads, too. That failure to graduate shatters many teenagers’ ambitions and dooms them to a lifetime of lower income and the problems, for them and the community, of unemployment and welfare.

Abstinence works as a sure preventive measure against pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. But given the reality that a large majority of teenagers don’t practice it, students who are sexually active also need to know how to protect themselves. That information should ideally come from the home. But too often, because of embarrassment or whatever reason, it doesn’t. So it comes from other teenagers. Or trial and error, which is loaded with error.

School programs that are realistic about the risks of pregnancy and the ways to avoid it can help. A better way is the so-called abstinence plus approach, which urges abstinence until marriage--but also discusses contraception.

Scientific studies have proved that sex education based on abstinence doesn’t reduce teenage sexual activity or pregnancy. Neither does talking about sex in the classroom prompt teenage sex. But it does make those students who are sexually active more likely to use protection. Santa Ana’s programs should reflect those facts.