Lawmakers Tackle Teen Pregnancy

by Lacey McLaughlin
January 13, 2011

A 13-year-old Jackson Public Schools student kisses her 30-year-old boyfriend as he drops her off at school one morning. When school officials call the teen's mother. She shows little concern saying, "He takes care of her, he helps her get the school supplies she needs."

A 12-year-old feels her baby move inside her for the first time and asks: "What I am feeling? I didn't think it would be alive until the doctor spanked it."

An 11-year-old student says she knows her 21-year-old boyfriend loves her because he said she looks good and bought her dinner at Popeye's.

As a long-time JPS educator, these are just a few of the examples of complex social issues Nancy Sylvester recalled yesterday during a joint legislative hearing on teen pregnancy at the state Capitol.

"These situations are occurring all across the state, as (they) have been for a number of years, and we are always asking, 'What do we do?,'" Sylvester told an audience of more than 50 lawmakers and citizens. "... The issues are deeper than children just wanting to be sexually active."

Sylvester, who initially advocated for abstinence-until-marriage education for the school district, says sex education needs to include information about contraceptives, but to be effective, it must also address social, emotional and mental-health issues of teens and families.

Mississippi Department of Health Officer Mary Currier also pushed for lawmakers to pass comprehensive sex-education legislation. Currier displayed data from a Department of Health survey showing 44.9 percent of Mississippi high-school students say they had sexual intercourse within the three months leading up to the survey. She recommended school districts implement programs that teach students refusal skills in nonsexual situations to sixth graders and the consequences of sex to seventh graders.

Currently, school districts are not required to teach sex education. Most follow the Mississippi Department of Education's Framework guidelines, which only teach abstinence-until-marriage and basic information about sexually transmitted diseases. School districts have the authority to adopt a sex-education policy, however, with school board approval.

Shane McNeill, director of MDE's Healthy Schools program, said only five districts in the state have sex-education policies and couldn't specify whether they required comprehensive education or abstinence-only education.

Abstinence-only advocates Larry McAdoo of Redemption Outreach Ministries and Dr. Freda Bush, local obstetrician and gynecologist, also attended the hearing and asked lawmakers to push for stronger abstinence-only until marriage policies. McAdoo pointed to a 2010 "Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine" study that found that abstinence-centered sex education is more effective than comprehensive sex education. The study followed teens who participated in an abstinence program for two years and found that 67 percent of teens did not have sex compared to 48 percent of students who did not get any sex education.

James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youths, a teen reproductive and sexual health organization, is among the many critics of the study. "There is no data in this study to support the 'abstain until marriage' programs, which research proved ineffective during the Bush administration," he told The Washington Post in February.

Still, advocates of abstinence-only programs along with some critics, hail the report as vindication for their point-of-view.

The Legislature has failed to pass sex-education bills in the past. Last year Reps. John Mayo, D-Clarksdale, and Alyce Clarke, D-Jackson, introduced House Bill 837 requiring that school districts implement either a "abstinence only" or an "abstinence plus" sex-education policy. The bill passed in the House, but died in the Senate Committee. Clarke has introduced a similar bill this year, and it currently waits for a vote in the House Education Committee.


Also see the JFP 2010 cover story "Kids Having Kids".

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