AP Photo/Gail Burton

Everyone wants fewer teen pregnancies and fewer cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The question is: How do we get there?

Conservatives demand that school sex education programs be limited to promotion of abstinence until marriage. Liberals insist on lessons about all the contraceptives, and STD prevention, which means promotion of condoms. The two sides appear to be passionately antagonistic. But that’s an illusion. Actually, they share remarkably similar core values. And neither of their approaches has been shown to reduce teen sex, pregnancies, or STDs.

Meanwhile, a large body of research reveals the real key to reducing teen sexual irresponsibility: parents’ willingness to discuss their sexual values with their kids. If schools jettisoned sex education classes and instead sponsored seminars to help parents become better sex educators at home, it’s clear that teen pregnancies and STDs would decline. Parents also might encourage teen sexual responsibility based on a concept foreign to both liberals and conservatives, the simple fact that safe sex is better sex.

Surprise: Teens are sexually conservative

Both liberals and conservatives rail about "the teen sex crisis." Hence the political tug-of-war over sex education in schools. If there ever was a teen sex crisis, it has abated. Over the past 15 years, surveys by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that teens have become considerably more conservative and responsible. From 1991 to 2003:

• Teens reporting intercourse dropped from 54 percent to 47 percent.
• Among sexually active teens, condom use jumped from 46 percent to 63 percent.
• Births to teens fell 33 percent.
• Teen diagnoses of the most prevalent STD, chlamydia, have remained roughly the same for the past 10 years.

Who deserves credit?

Conservatives insist the decline in teen sex proves that abstinence education is paying off. They are mistaken. The abstinence push began in 1998. But according to the CDC, teen STD (chlamydia) rates have not changed significantly in ten years. The teen birth rate started falling seven years earlier. Abstinence-only sex ed is most deeply entrenched in the South, and notably less popular in the rest of the country. Guess where teens are most likely to become pregnant — in the South. According to the CDC, teen birth rates in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are two to three times those in Vermont, New York, and Minnesota. Abstinence programs ask teens to vow virginity until marriage. But a CDC study shows that only 12 percent of those who take virginity vows keep them. In other words, abstinence education has an 88 percent failure rate. Finally, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, analyzed 26 studies of efforts to reduce teen pregnancy. Abstinence-only programs did not delay first intercourse. In fact, pregnancies often increased.

I hate to say it, but liberal sex education fares no better. Before I became a journalist, I worked in family planning. I talked up contraceptives and STD prevention in many middle schools and high schools. I thought I got through to the students. I was mistaken. The McMaster analysis included many liberal programs. They, too, had no impact: no delay of intercourse, no increased use of contraceptives, and no fewer pregnancies.

"Dangers-of-sex" education

Where I live, San Francisco, the liberal sex education program includes STD prevention and all the contraceptives. Nonetheless, my son came home and announced that only one contraceptive is 100 percent effective—abstinence.

Nonsense. Another method is 100 percent effective—not to mention, popular, enjoyable, and free. It’s non-intercourse lovemaking, genital massage, and oral sex. But even the most liberal programs never mention it. To do so would acknowledge sexual pleasure, and negate the core value that unites liberals and conservatives more than anything divides them, namely, that for teens, sex is dangerous. Forget "sex education." What schools provide is "dangers-of-sex" education.

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