North Carolina, which currently has a mostly abstinence-focused sex education curriculum, is considering mandating comprehensive sex education from kindergarten to ninth grade, according to WRAL-TV.

The bill would allow abstinence-only programs to be taught up to the seventh grade and require that school systems allow parents to review all sexual-education materials before they are taught.

From seventh grade and on, students would be taught the following:

• that abstinence is “the only certain way to prevent unintended pregnancy” and “reduce the sexual transmission of diseases, including HIV/AIDS”
• about how sexually transmitted diseases are spread, the effectiveness of federal Food and Drug Administration-approved methods to reduce the risk of transmission and local resources for testing and treating STDs
• about the effectiveness and safety of FDA-approved contraceptive methods, including emergency contraception
• life skills for healthy behaviors and to avoid risky behaviors, such as alcohol and drug abuse, especially intravenous drug use

The article also mentions “Baby, Think It Over,” a lifelike doll that resembles a 3-month-old baby that some middle school students must take care of.

Have you ever had to care for one of these dolls in a health or sex education class? Do you think dealing with a constantly crying and needy doll helps deter kids from having sex and from teen pregnancy? Here’s a video of one girl’s experience with these realistic babies:

A forum about sex education in Florida’s St. Lucie County schools managed to garner several hundred attendees.

The local school superintendent recommended Get Real about AIDS, which includes discussion of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as both abstinence and contraception, to the school board in August.

School officials released a modified version of Get Real About AIDS last week in which they removed descriptions of sexual activities, hands-on demonstrations of condoms and an exercise where students would have been asked to purchase condoms. Despite those modifications, controversy over the curriculum has not diminished.

According to the Palm Beach Post article, the program was recommended in light of concerns that the health curriculum wasn’t doing enough to combat sexually transmitted diseases. St. Lucie County has Florida’s highest rate of HIV and AIDS cases among black residents, according to statistics the health department released last year.

To see how your state compares to others in AIDS/HIV rates, as well as other health care issues, you might want to check out the Kaiser Foundation’s state health facts Web site.

According to the Christian Post and CitizenLink.com, a study published in the Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of the “American Journal of Health Behavior” will show that programs by the Virginia health department’s Abstinence Education Initiative resulted in a “significant reduction in teen sexual initiation.”

The Institute for Research and Evaluation evaluated the impact of the programs by examining the behavior of seventh-graders from five different Virginia schools. The study concluded that those students receiving abstinence education were about one-half (45.7 percent) as likely to initiate sexual activity as students who did not receive abstinence education.

News of the study broke soon after this week’s announcement that Virginia’s governor had decided to halt funding for abstinence-only education programs.  It also comes on the heels of a nationwide study that stated abstinence-only education is unproven for stopping teen sex.

A University of Florida study presented Monday at the American Public Health Association’s meeting shows that sex education programs in Florida’s public schools vary widely in content and often are not allocated much class time.

Although the content of programs was mostly aligned with the state’s requirement of abstinence-only education, the content of programs varied by region.

Teachers in North Florida were twice as likely as teachers in Central Florida and three times as likely as those in South Florida to teach an abstinence-only curriculum.

“Most people are aware that there are major cultural differences between, say, Miami and Tallahassee,” Frank Bandiera [a research team member] said. “What we found in terms of sex education, though, is that these places may as well be on different planets.”

There were also differences in the sources of curricula.

“More than half of sex educators used a ‘locally developed curriculum,’” Brian Dodge [a lead investigator] said. “In reality this could be anything. Respondents to our survey reported using everything from formal state guidelines to random Internet information and outdated county curricula. In short, there appears to be no uniformity in terms of underlying value systems or philosophical foundations for sex education in Florida.”

Teachers also reported that less than one-quarter of overall class time was allocated to sex education and that it was often taught as part of another course.

I thought the study’s finding that in a third of the schools, parents need to opt in, rather than opt out, for their children to receive sex education was also interesting. Although I understand the desire to give parents greater control over what their children are exposed to, I think it opens the possibility that parents who support sex education in schools but may not be as aware of the possibilities will miss out. The parents need to not only be aware of the programs, but also be highly motivated and actively seek them out for their children.

This study also seems to confirm the general belief that states can vary widely in their sex education curricula and sometimes not even offer it because it’s not federally mandated.

President Bush’s daughter Jenna appears to advocate comprehensive sex ed and contraception usage in her new book, despite the president’s support for abstinence-based sex education programs, according to The Drudge Report. Jenna’s new book, Ana’s Story, is a biography of a 17-year old HIV-positive mother.

There’s no pabulum about abstinence-only education from the young author whose dad funneled $50 million annually to such programs, despite a complete lack of evidence they work.

“Children need to be free to discuss all of life’s issues … with safe and trustworthy adults,” Jenna writes. “Equipped with information and knowledge, children can then take the steps necessary to protect themselves and to break the cycle that perpetuates abuse and spreads disease from one generation to the next.”

The Drudge Report’s review raises some interesting issues, including the question of whether children must necessarily adopt their parents’ views on social and moral issues. This reminds me of all the media attention several years ago surrounding the revelation that Mary Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, is gay, despite her father’s and the president’s opposition to many gay rights measures.

Is there any chance that Jenna Bush’s views on sex education would influence the president, or vice versa? If you’ve read Ana’s Story, do you agree that Jenna Bush seems to advocate comprehensive sex education?

The Guttmacher Institute’s October 2007 “State Policies in Brief” report provides a helpful overview of which U.S. states mandate sex education and what type of content is required if it’s taught.

HIGHLIGHTS:

• 20 states and the District of Columbia mandate that public schools teach sex education; many states, including several that do not mandate sex education, place requirements on how abstinence and contraception are treated when taught.
• 23 states require that abstinence be stressed when taught as part of sex education; 10 states require simply that it be covered during instruction.
• 15 states and the District of Columbia require that sex education programs cover contraception; no state requires that it be stressed.

My state, Illinois, does not mandate that sex education be taught. But if it is taught, abstinence is supposed to be stressed. What does your state mandate?