Dialogue: A pox on condoms and sex education

There is never much satisfaction in saying "I told you so," but revelations this week that the rate of pregnancies among our teenage girls continues to soar, and that our young people are suffering a raging epidemic of venereal diseases, make it difficult not to.

Time and again in this column in the past four years I have argued that the sex education strategies of the Family Planning Association, financed with taxpayers' money by a succession of governments, were not only futile but positively counterproductive.

And so it has transpired. On Tuesday, the association's executive director, Dr Gil Greer, let the nation know that the rate of unplanned pregnancies in this country is the second highest in the developed world and that rates of the venereal diseases gonorrhoea and chlamydia are ahead of those recorded in many developed nations.

It gets worse. Latest figures estimated that rates of the exclusively female chlamydia among 15 to 19-year-old women are 4466 per 100,000 compared with 700 in Britain and 939 in Canada. And the estimated total teenage pregnancy rate in 1997 was 65 per 1000.

And all this after several decades of so-called sex education plotted, promoted and peddled by Family Planning.

Way back when contraception was something that was talked about only in whispers, the association was established to help married women to plan their families by teaching those who wanted to know all about the various methods available. But like so many quangos, over time it saw itself running out of things to spend money on, so expanded the work to fill the budget.

In recent times, its main impetus has not been family planning at all, but offering sex education and contraceptives to schoolchildren and, what is infinitely worse, insisting that they partake. It has also been instrumental in arranging abortions for girls as young as 13, often without the knowledge or consent of their parents.

And one of the dreadful results has been that tens of thousands of children - among them many of those who today are finding themselves impregnated or poxed - have been abruptly robbed of their innocence.

Instead of being allowed to grow naturally into sexual awareness, they have had it forced upon them, often long before they would have come to it themselves and long before many of them were ready to receive it. This has been done often over the legitimate protests of parents, teachers and others, whose concerns have been swept aside by the dogmatic purveyors of what amounts to juvenile pornography.

It's the "we know best" syndrome writ at its largest and it shows no signs of abating, for the association, having failed abjectly to achieve it aims - and, obviously, having made the problem much worse - is now bleating to the Government to bail it out.

Dr Greer, having pointed out that the Government's "apparent intention" to implement a plan next September would be too late, said: "It is not a matter of if the crisis occurs or when. It is here now and we have no time to lose."

Then the whole sorry business descends into the absurd when Health Minister Annette King responds that she has "great sympathy" with what the association is saying and had asked her ministers to "put more effort" into developing the strategy.

And then into the bizarre when a spokeswoman for Youth Minister Laila Harre says the minister is working on a youth development strategy, ideas for which included providing better access to condoms and sex education.

For heavens sake, where have these people been for the past 20 years? The FPA, aided and abetted by so-called educationists and others, has been peddling condoms and sex education to our children for all that time and all that has happened is that today they are suffering from an epidemic of teenage pregnancy and a pandemic of venereal disease.

Yet nowhere is there the slightest acknowledgment that those who have perpetrated this atrocity on our young people have made a tragic, horrendous mistake.

There is only one strategy that has any chance of success and that is to toss out all the programmes devised in the past 20 years, disband the Family Planning Association, tear up all the sex education material ever written for schoolchildren, return condoms to brothels, bars and chemist shops, and start all over again.

How about we just leave it to parents (and we can give them all the support the exchequer will bear) to teach, or not to teach, their sons and daughters the ways of men and women? Reactionary? Certainly. But human sexuality is and always has been a deeply mysterious, personal and individual thing. Let's put it back where it belongs.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz