Girls Learn Risks Of Getting ‘Lucky’

It wasn’t the news any seventh-grade girl should have to have. Guess what. You’re pregnant.

Fortunately for this young girl, the dilemma at hand was only a game, an exercise in choices. She’d have a chance to choose more wisely in real life.

The game was called “In the Sack.” It involved a purple sack of coins, each symbolizing the sex act. They were jingled in front of the girls.

Goaded to do so, a few giggled and reached in. A few immediately regretted it. They had pulled out the coin saying, “You’re pregnant,” or “HIV-infected,” or “herpes.” A few pulled out coins that said, “You got lucky.”

The 13-year-olds were participating in Nobody’s Fool, an annual sex education conference sponsored by Planned Parenthood.

They were learning that every choice has consequences. Even the “luckies” didn’t get off without knowing that a hop “in the sack” had consequences, that emotions can be scarred, that relationships can take on strangling dimensions.

Instructor Jaymie Sattiewhite launched into a discussion of saying no, even when mature Mr. Right, age 15, says, “Come on, I love you.” The girls went around the circle devising ways to defuse the situation.

“Let’s practice our no’s,” said Sattiewhite.

Elsewhere in at the conference a young lady was telling young girls that she wished she had practiced saying no. Patty had a child when she was 14. Now grown and the mother of two, she told the middle-schoolers assembled how it had disrupted her childhood.

“I missed out on college. I didn’t get to walk across the stage with my classmates. I didn’t get to go to prom. I couldn’t face my friends. Things really changed.”

She said that her father insisted on having an abortion but her mother took the opposite position. “I don’t remember having an opinion,” she said.

Some of the girls in the audience seemed incredulous when Patty pleaded ignorance about what could happen because of sex, something she and her parents had never discussed.

“I honestly felt it wasn’t going to happen to me,” she said. “My advice is to abstain from sex.”

Seeing children discuss matters of sex is like exploring the other side of the moon. Their ignorance is exceeded only by our ignorance - what we think they know.

In one room, seventh-grade boys were in small groups discussing matters of sex with instructors. Unlike most of the girls their age, whose bodies have already shifted into reproductive drive, the boys seemed not to have a clue about making babies. The boys were at a total loss to explain the sex act, although their consensus was that the consequences were heavy-duty.

“When do you know you’re ready to have sex?” was the question asked of the group.

“After a blood test,” said one.

“When you’re married,” said another. “It says so in the Bible.”

Among the materials given out was a pamphlet, “Not Everyone’s Doin’ It.”

Back at “In the Sack,” after practicing saying no, the girls were given another chance to reach for a coin. Now they were refusing to reach in the grab bag, even when goaded.

The girls knew that having sex was more than rolling the dice with one’s youth and fertility. It’s also a matter of life and death.

“The winner is the one who says no,” said Sattiewhite.

After they were through, I reached in the bag and risked the odds on behalf of a community that worries about young people like these. “You got lucky,” said my coin.

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