Website owner: James Miller
The truth about sex education
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 200 - 202
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Some Lessons from Australia
Italians are one of the largest immigrant groups in Australia. A recent study showed that Italian-born women in Australia have only one child out-of-wedlock for every 148 births.
The same study says that these women have seldom received "sex education" and know little about contraceptives.
This contradicts everything our deep thinkers keep saying about the need for more sex education in the schools and massive international programs of contraception and abortion. Values do more to prevent teenage pregnancy and family disintegration than trendy talk and costly programs.
Those who make a living by stampeding us into hysteria are not about to look at hard evidence. That makes it all the more urgent for the rest of us to look at the facts before we get hypnotized by rhetoric.
Throughout the Western world, population growth fell sharply during the 1930s—long before "the pill" or sex education. When times were tough, people had fewer children. Back in those days, it was understood that you were supposed to support any children you brought into the world. People acted accordingly.
Sex education has been sold as a way to prevent teenage pregnancy and venereal disease. Both have skyrocketed after sex education has been introduced.
It is hardly surprising. Much of what is called "sex education" is nothing more than propagandizing school children with the latest fads in beliefs about sex. A captive audience of inexperienced young minds is turned over to zealots for "the sexual revolution," to people who depict homosexuality as simply "an alternative lifestyle," and to all those who are more concerned with being "with it" than with being right. Parents and their values are treated as obstacles to "progress."
One ninth grade textbook says that sex between children and adults "usually" causes "no permanent emotional harm." How the author knows that—or can prove it—is beyond me. But who needs evidence? This textbook is used in Palo Alto, home of the deep thinkers from Stanford University.
The personal tragedies and social catastrophies that have followed from reckless experiments have all been blamed on other things. Runaway teenage pregnancy in the black ghettoes is blamed on "the legacy of slavery." Yet black teenage pregnancy was nowhere near this high before welfare payments turned it into an "alternative lifestyle."
Puerto Ricans have an even higher rate of teenage pregnancies than blacks, and they do not come out of a legacy of slavery. But the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland began after the welfare state was already in place. That is the common factor.
Mexican Americans are similar to Puerto Ricans in many ways, but Mexicans are not automatically citizens and their history of aversion to government puts additional barriers between them and the welfare state. Despite many cultural and economic similarities between Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans have far lower rates of teenage pregnancy or broken families.
Against this background, it is hardly surprising that Italians in Australia have extremely low rates of illegitimate births. In this "modern" and "progressive" age, few people have so maintained family values as the Italians, whether in Australia or elsewhere.
Italians are relatively recent immigrants to Australia—mostly since World War II—and so have below average incomes and education. Many are concentrated in poor neighborhoods. All these things are supposed to cane teenage pregnancy.
The fact that they don't causes no second thoughts among deep thinkers in Australia. They are in fact striving mightily to get the Italian immigrants drawn into the orbit of the welfare state. Fortunately, the Italians are resisting—and advancing on their own. Despite lower than average incomes, Italians in Australia own their own homes more frequently than the average Australian.
—October 18, 1984
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31 May 2024
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