North Carolina: Two Choices on Table for Sex Education

Two state representatives plan to introduce a bill that would allow parents to decide whether their children will be taught comprehensive or abstinence-only sex education. Reps. Susan Fisher of Asheville and Bob England of Ellenboro are proposing the legislation.

Since 1995, North Carolina has mandated an abstinence-only curriculum that limits instruction about how contraception can help prevent STDs and pregnancy. Local schools have to get permission to offer comprehensive sex education; most do not pursue this option.

In Cumberland County, where sex education is taught in grades seven through nine, teachers are barred from discussing with students how a condom is properly used. A teacher can refer students with questions outside the permitted range of topics to their parents or someone else, said Shirley Johnson, the Cumberland Board of Education's coordinator for healthful living.

Expanding parents' sex education options could help reduce the number of teen parents in Douglas Byrd High School, said Jackie Warner, its principal. "We're seeing ninth-graders that have already had children. I'm dealing with much younger pregnant girls, and much younger young men that are now fathers."

A lobbyist for the North Carolina Family Policy Council, a conservative Christian organization, is wary of such a bill. Properly taught, abstinence-only sex education is effective, said John Rustin. In practice, the quality "varies widely" and "there is very little accountability," he acknowledged. "Certainly there are in some areas of the state deficiencies in the instruction, but it's not a deficiency of the law."

North Carolina now ranks ninth in the United States for teen pregnancies. Its rate had declined 36 percent from 1992 to 2003 before a recent, slight uptick. In 2006, 63 of every 1,000 state girls ages 15-19 were pregnant.

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