Lawmakers debate expanding sex ed
OLYMPIA – While lovers everywhere were scurrying to find last-minute cards and candy Wednesday, part of the state Senate celebrated Valentine’s Day with a tense discussion of sexual abstinence.
More than a third of the Senate has signed on to a proposal to require “medically and scientifically accurate” sex education in schools that choose to offer the subject. The bill would ban abstinence-only teaching in favor of a comprehensive curriculum that would still include abstinence. Parents could still opt their children out of the classes.
The proponents, all of them Democrats, say they’re just being realistic. It’s hard for many parents to talk to their kids about sex, they point out, but teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates suggest that kids clearly need to know more about the risks they face.
“Now, I’m a Christian, and I believe abstinence is best,” said Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, the prime sponsor of Senate Bill 5297. “Unfortunately, when you’re young, your emotions sometimes rule your brain.”
Parents often don’t know everything they should about the subject, and children need accurate, comprehensive information, she said. Schools are an obvious place to teach it. “As far as I’m concerned,” Haugen said, “this is as basic as reading and writing.”
Republicans on the Senate’s education and early learning committee, however, predicted a voter backlash if the state tries to take away local school districts’ ability to teach sex education as they see fit. (Under current state law, public schools must annually teach fifth-graders and older children about AIDS and its prevention.) “We’re just going to have a fight in my community,” said Sen. Jim Clements, R-Selah.
Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, predicted that the bill would backfire. Given a choice between a state-driven curriculum and no sex education at all, he predicted, school districts in socially conservative communities would simply not teach the topic.
Another GOP senator questioned the propriety of what the state guidelines would call for teaching to young children. While TVW cameras rolled, Sen. Janea Holmquist – after warning parents to get young children away from the television – read a list of vocabulary words that she said are part of a state-approved curriculum for fourth-graders in one county.
“I just want to mention a few of the words and the vocabulary that fourth-graders are expected to know,” the Moses Lake Republican said, reading from a list. ” ‘Privacy. Nocturnal emission. Labia. Clitoris. Penis. Ovulation. Genitals. Ovum. Erection. Scrotum. Vagina.’ It goes on and on.” Holmquist said.
Karen Cooper, executive director of the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice Washington, was nonplussed.
“I am astounded,” she said, “that the good senator finds correct body parts dirty words.”
Many children get only partial information about sex, said the Rev. Dennis Magnuson, a Puyallup Methodist minister.
“The issue here isn’t one of morality,” he said. “It’s a public health issue.”
The answer, he said, is a blend that teaches both abstinence and comprehensive sex education. Or, as Magnuson puts it, ABC: “A for abstinence, B for being faithful, and C for condom.”
Backing up that argument was 30-year-old Jessica Weiss, a math, science and foreign language standout in high school who planned on a career in biogenetics. But she became pregnant. She and her boyfriend were devastated by the news, she said.
“Both of our hopes and dreams were ruined,” she said. “I ended up graduating from high school six months pregnant and married.”
Now 30 with three children, she and her husband are divorcing.
“This is not the predicament anyone wants their child or daughter or friend to be in,” she said. “It’s a terrible situation to be in, and comprehensive sex ed has far-reaching effects that go beyond keeping kids from getting STDs.”
It is still hard for her to see graduating students, “full of promise, getting up and accepting their scholarships, and just thinking what my life could have been,” she said.