I believe that people are allowed to have and enjoy sex. I will take it one step further to say I believe women, in particular, are allowed to have and enjoy sex. There are a lot of things about being a woman in the United States that make me feel empowered and grateful to call this country home. The fact that my country seems not to want me, or anyone I know who has received federally or state-funded education, to have sex isn’t one of them.
At the bottom line, human dignity and economics alike create a case that sex education comes with a sense of power, and therefore empowerment. When people know the power in their bodies and the choices they have at their disposal, they are healthier, choices are free to be made, and they are less ashamed of their bodies and the miraculous things they have the ability to do, if we want these things to be done.
Across the country, students are provided with sexual health information biased based on race, religion and ethnicity. It can be cited as inappropriate for students’ ages, according to recent Guttmacher Institute analysis. According to this analysis and a poll taken by Huffington Post in association with YouGov, 37 states allow for medically inaccurate sex education; a mere 18 states require teachers to provide information about contraception; sex education is not required at all in 28 states; and 19 of the states that do provide it require only abstinence to be covered.
To then say that the United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates of any developed country (which correlates directly to abortion and STI rates) according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services and the Guttmacher Institute, feels far from surprising.
What I want to talk about here is that issues as divisive as teen pregnancy, abortion and STIs do not exist in a vacuum. Just as I identify as pro-choice, I too identify with everything that comes before that very choice and everything that surrounds it. Choices look different when you see them as conditional on the environment and knowledge you are given to make them.
Education should be our baseline for equality as an unbiased and equal-opportunity playing field. While that notion can be naive even for the U.S., once we have children in classrooms we should not be working to knowingly deceive them. To believe that inaccurate or abstinence-only education should be taught in schools seems equivalent to me to teaching creationism theory as a valid opposing theory to evolution. In no other field of learning do lessons so knowingly deceive our students. Children don’t need myths, stories or agenda-pushing fairy tales, determined solely on geography and political opinion, to miseducate them. All genders must know the truth about their bodies. This need is urgent, and it is vital. Children must be able to trust that the truths they are told are from an unbiased source. We owe it to ourselves and our nation’s children to provide facts about a topic that will inevitably affect most of our society. We don’t need falsehood. We don’t need silence either.
By this, I mean that sexual education in most public school systems does not touch on topics of sexual orientation or non-conforming gender identities. Without education, our young people are left without tools to facilitate healthy exploration and personal acceptance at a critical age. Inherently, this system is both heteronormative and transphobic. I know that I wouldn’t have known what sex between two people of the same gender was if my parents hadn’t believed that I had the right to a full range of sexual knowledge. All children are not afforded the same education at home that I was. We should all be able to rely on the fact that children will receive this information regardless of circumstances outside of their control.
When women are ignored or treated poorly over archaic practices that ignore science and fact to preach abstinence, until the day a girl shows up at an abortion clinic, we are not better for it. One in three women will have an abortion according to Advocates For Youth’s “1 in 3” campaign. NARAL Pro-Choice America and The Wall Street Journal state that seven in 10 Americans support pro-choice values, while only four in 10 members of Congress support those values. Not only do I find this shameful, I find it potentially avoidable. Democracy should work for its people. It needs to be that simple.
I wish we would spend more time treating women as humans. I wish we would spend more time respecting one another. I wish we would spend more time treating the female body as a completely independent and gloriously human one. Education, true education, empowers.
