What students learn in sex ed has taken on new urgency following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to reverse Roe v. Wade, leaving abortion access up to the states. Advocates are focusing on this dynamic as the Texas Republican Party targets what students learn in school.
Research suggests that teens can benefit from comprehensive sexual education. delay intercourse and avoid unplanned pregnancy. However, most states do not require schools teach comprehensive sex education. New legislation and policy proposals in some states may also limit the curriculum available to students.
The Texas GOP’s official 2022 platformLast week’s release would ban “teaching of sex education, sexual health, or sexual choice or identity in any public school” and enforce policies embraced by anti-abortion movements, such as having students observe live ultrasounds and requiring schools to teach that life begins at fertilization. Students would also need to read a booklet that contains medically false information about abortion.
Students could find themselves in serious trouble if they don’t receive the right sex education in Texas or elsewhere in the country. This includes sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies they can’t legally terminate that make them vulnerable to quitting school and living in poverty.
“Programs that don’t include high quality, inclusive sex ed are really harmful to young people,” said Gillian Sealy, chief of staff at Power to Decide, the campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancy. “We anticipate that [the Supreme Court]This ruling will have a negative effect on young people. We really want young people to be able to finish school; we want them to get an education.”
While elected officials don’t have to implement their parties’ platforms, Republican lawmakers in Texas could attempt to reframe the curriculum based on the newly released GOP agenda, sex ed proponents contend.
“It’s absolutely possible,” said Elizabethe Payne, a former Houston teacher and the founder and director of the Queering Education Research Institute, which works to create LGBTQ+ youth-affirming schools. “Texas education policy has always been impacted by the conservative right. These ideas all have been percolating for a number of decades in the state.”
Representatives for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment about the state’s plans for sex ed. Texas currently offers a curriculum for sex education. However, it doesn’t require instruction to be medically correct, emphasizes abstinence, discusses consent, and frames homosexuality negatively. Texas families are required to opt in their children for sex-ed instruction. This arrangement, according to sex advocates, will result in too few students attending such classes.
Comprehensive sex education includes lessons about sexual behavior and sexual health, as well as human development and healthy relationships according to the Guttmacher Institute. Comprehensive sex ed provides educational materials that are medically accurate and LGBTQ+ inclusive. Most students nationally do not receive sex ed that’s this exhaustive, and the information they do receive depends largely on the state where they live.
“What’s being delivered in classrooms around the country is a patchwork of policy and practice,” said Diana Thu-Thao Rhodes, vice president of policy, partnerships and organizing for Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that promotes adolescent sexual health programs and policies. “All 50 states have varying different sex education requirements, if at all, and much of that power is then given to local school districts that also vary from district to district.”
While the District of Columbia 39 states require schools to provide sex educationOnly 17 states require that the material be medically accurate. Only D.C. and 20 other states require schools teach contraception to students. Schools in 29 states are required to teach students about contraception. This is in contrast with comprehensive sex education, which makes sex an acceptable part of everyday life.
Advocates for comprehensive sexual education say that the push for anti-abortion lessons intersects with the national movement against educators discussing issues such as race and gender identity.
“Now, because of the recent Supreme Court decision, teachers and educators are already facing concerns about what they are allowed to teach, and what they are able to discuss in classrooms,” Thu-Thao Rhodes said. “That goes beyond the recent Supreme Court decision to the fact that schools have become the center of the culture wars across the board, whether it is around book banning, whether it is around LGBT inclusion, whether it is critical race theory.”
Thu-Thao stated that restricting abortion access will only make existing concerns about Texas’s sexual health instruction worse. In the months before the high court’s ruling, Texas took steps to curtail abortion It has now implemented a total functional ban.
Texas ranks ninth in the nation in the rate of pregnancy among teens According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2019, the age range was 15 to 19. In 2005, Texas, along with New Mexico, had the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rate. In Texas, there were almost 62 births per 1,000 teens aged 15-19 in that year. However, the teen pregnancy rate had fallen by more than 60% by 2019. This is a significant improvement that many attribute to efforts made to educate kids about reproductive health. However, the Texas teen pregnant rate (22.4 per 1000 teens) is still significantly higher than the national 16.7 per 1,000 teen birth rate. The state remains ranked at the bottom of the list. number one for repeat teen births.
“We’ve done such a good job bringing [teen pregnancy] rates down,” Sealy said. “And it seems as though we’re moving backward, where we could possibly see those rates increase, especially among communities of color and rural communities, where there’s economic disadvantages.”
Experts fear that unplanned pregnancies among teens may increase high school dropout rates if the Texas GOP platform becomes reality. About half of pregnant teens do not graduate from high school. Sealy stated that public schools are often lacking the funding and wraparound services necessary to provide the support required for pregnant and parenting teens. Schools are unlikely to be able to respond to an increase in teenage pregnancies due to abortion restrictions at both the state and federal levels. That’s why teens need access to contraception, Sealy said, but sex ed programs that exclude information about contraception and school health centers and insurance plans that don’t cover contraception both pose barriers.
“If you’re in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Texas is one of only two states that does not reimburse for contraceptives,” said Texas Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat. She added that the barriers teens in the state face don’t end there. “If you are a teen, you can consent for health care decisions about your baby, but you cannot cannot consent for yourself if you’re a minor. You cannot get contraceptives without parental consent even if you’re already a parent.”
Teen pregnancies can have ripple effects that reach the next generation. These ripple effects are not limited to the teen years. children born to adolescents more likely to become teen parents They are also more likely to be placed in child welfare and criminal justice systems, drop out of school, or face joblessness as adults. Howard is particularly concerned about what a lack in sex education and abortion access will mean for vulnerable teens, such as foster care children, who have higher rates than peers outside of the system.
“Some of these kids are in a foster care situation where they have their babies with them, but a lot of times the baby is placed in a separate foster care home,” Howard said. “They’re not even kept together. It’s a tragic kind of situation.”
Howard would like to see Texas youth get long-acting, reversible contraception. In Colorado, teens and young people received intrauterine devices and implants through the state’s family planning initiative, which a private donor funded in 2008. The initiative resulted in teen birth rates and teen abortions dropping by nearly half. Furthermore, births to unschooled women fell 38 percent, while repeat teen pregnancies fell 57%.
“Some of these kids are in a foster care situation where they have their babies with them, but a lot of times the baby is placed in a separate foster care home,” Howard said. “They’re not even kept together. It’s a tragic kind of situation.”
Howard would like to see Texas youth get long-acting, reversible contraception. In Colorado, teens and young people received intrauterine devices and implants through the state’s family planning initiative, which a private donor funded in 2008. The initiative resulted in teen birth rates and teen abortions dropping by nearly half. Additionally, the number of births to women who have not completed high school fell by 38 percent and repeat teenage pregnancies dropped by 57 percent.
However, schools will continue to play a major part in teaching students about their sexual health. That’s why the Texas GOP’s new platform planks worry Howard, who questions if they’re scientifically sound. It’s not easy to know where life starts. She cited Texas’ Senate Bill 8, one of a handful of laws across the nation known as “heartbeat bills” because they prohibit abortion after six weeks, the point at which their supporters argue that a fetal heartbeat can be detected.
“There is no heart at that point in time,” Howard said. “There are only cells that emit electrical activity that can be picked up by a Doppler machine and translate it into the sound of a heartbeat.”
She added that she has no problem with students learning about all aspects of pregnancy, but she fears that the GOP wants to use ultrasounds to perpetuate “mythological ideas.”
Texas GOP spokesperson James Wesolek told The 19th that the party would not “offer any further comment on the platform beyond what was said in our release,” which explains the procedures the party uses to vote and adopt its policy proposals.
Payne stated that the quality of sex education is not a Texas problem. She said that in New York where she lives, sex is not required, materials are often outdated, or contain gender stereotyping that makes girls the gatekeepers of sexual activities.
“It’s really important for us to be aware that the lack of sex education is a nationwide problem,” Payne said. “Even if you’re educating students in a state where abortion is still accessible, that does not mean that those young people are going to go to college in that state or they’re going to grow up and find jobs in that state.”
Proponents of comprehensive sex ed are also concerned about the impact that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law will have on sex education. This law went into effect July 1 and prohibits teachers from teaching lessons about gender identity or sexuality to students in grades K-3, or older, in a manner that is inappropriate for their age.
Payne said that this law and Roe’s reversal could have grave consequences for queer youth.
“It is important to know that queer teens are two times as likely as their sexually active straight counterparts to be involved in an unplanned pregnancy, and this includes gay boys,” she said. “Abortion is a queer issue. … We can only imagine that the outcome is also going to be disproportionate on queer kids when they can’t access the kinds of health care they need.”
Only 12 states and D.C. have laws that require sex ed to include the LGBTQ+ community. more young people than ever identify as queer. Critics of Don’t Say Gay say that it is written intentionally broadly and reports have already circulated that LGBTQ+ educators have removed pictures of their partners for fear of violating the legislation and facing disciplinary or legal action. The law will invariably affect what educators can discuss when they teach sex education, sex ed advocates stated. Florida was one of four states that required sex education laws to be enacted before the law was enacted. This included Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Mississippi. schools to discuss homosexuality in negative terms.
Thu-Thao Rhodes says this is a disservice for young people. She stated that young people deserve and need to have full access to information about their reproductive and sexual health in order to make good decisions.
“And what we’re seeing is law after law about what can be discussed in classrooms impacting their sexual health education and also their ability to affirm their identities and create safe and supportive environments in schools,” she said.
