Last week, New York City announced that it would be bringing sex education back into public schools. I don’t have high hopes. That announcement came the day after the city released its standardized test scores. And here they are: 43.9 percent of New York City students met or exceeded the English proficiency standard. In math, 57.3 percent of city students were proficient.
The good news is that sex education may be simpler than math and English. In fact, it’s so simple that even teenagers in underprivileged neighborhoods understand it. The arguments about the content of sex education–abstinence or, well, a lot of information–are not particularly relevant. The truth of the matter is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant not because they don’t understand how not to get pregnant (which, let’s face it, is not rocket science) but because they want babies. Teenagers (and many adults) think babies will provide unconditional love. And the longterm responsibilities involved are not fully grasped.
As Kay Hymowitz wrote a couple of years ago after a group of teenagers in Gloucester, MA turned out to have made a “pregnancy pact,”:
Many young women who become pregnant these days either want to have a baby (as in Gloucester) or are, at the very least, open to the idea. In order for birth control to work, you have to use it religiously, and the only way you use it religiously is if you really, really don’t want to get pregnant. Yet researchers like Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefelas in Promises I Can Keep find that’s not the case for many low-income mothers. They describe young women who speak longingly about the “joys of motherhood” and who find the middle-class penchant for putting off motherhood until the later twenties incomprehensible.
