Daily Iowan

Issue date: 3/5/08 Section: Opinions

The lessons we learn in high school help us prepare for college in a myriad of ways. Such skills as balancing a checkbook, doing laundry, and writing a solid paper are discovered both in and out of the classroom. Many in Iowa City would also point to their sexual education as being beneficial to life at the UI, whether that instruction was given at home, in class, or through some other form. Late last week, the state of Iowa made clear exactly how that lesson will be taught for future students.

Iowa is now the 17th state to reject Title V funding for abstinence-only sex education, which provides $4 in federal funds for every $3 the state spends, allowing for $50 million nationally. According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the Iowa Department of Public Health, which is responsible for these funds, doled out slightly more than $212,000 in 2006, $45,000 of which went to the UI to cover the mandated evaluation of the program.

In 2007, Rep. Mary Mascher, D-Iowa City, sponsored a bill that, when passed last spring, set guidelines requiring all of Iowa's sex-education curricula to be scientifically based. This created a conflict with the federal guidelines for Title V funding, which its opponents say are not medically accurate.

According to the Iowa Department of Public Health, there are eight specific criteria used in appropriating federal funds under section 510, defining abstinence-only education. Some included require that a program "[have] as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity." This stipulation, the first listed under section 510, eliminates the potential for comprehensive sex education, which means teachers or instructors approached by students asking about methods of contraception cannot discuss these methods. Also listed are requirements that a program "teach that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity" and that "sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects."

The responsibility of teaching a teenager about sex is, first and foremost, that of a parent. How that lesson is taught is also up to the parent, but it can't be forgotten that sex education in school - in concert with parental coaching - is a critical key to preventing teen pregnancy and STDs. Making such curricula scientifically and medically accurate would seem to be of obvious importance. The history, science, and geography we teach are all vetted and triple-checked for accuracy, so why not sex ed?

Arguments for or against abstinence-only education aside, continuing to take Title V funding would be intellectually dishonest. Gov. Chet Culver and the state Legislature should be commended for halting these subsidies. Without knowledge there is only ignorance, and in order for Iowa's youth to make the right decisions at the right times they must have knowledge. Abstinence doesn't always work. Ignoring that fact does not make it go away.

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