Contraception in the Classroom: Domestic Population Control, Part One

When confronted with the un-relenting drive to force sex education upon their schoolchildren, many bemused parents ask; “Why are they doing this?”

Why indeed?

Why the crowding out of history and mathematics and music to teach sex and contraception? Why the distribution of free condoms in school? Why the school “health” clinics that provide birth control? Why the hiring of youngsters to recruit their fellow students for birth control services? Why the ever-present counseling on “gender identity” and the “normality” of homosexuality?

Although the promoters of sex education contend that various problems (such as “teenage pregnancy” and the AIDS epidemic) justify their programs, the effort to force sex education into the schools began long before the problems appeared or aroused concern.

Parents vs. Misguided Policies

Sex education has another agenda that goes far beyond the false justifications given for it. Shortly after the US government initiated its domestic family planning program in 1965, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued a report calling for sex education in the schools.1 According to the domestic family planning program, young people, in the Department’s view, must be made to perceive their “responsibilities” in the area of birth control. Congressional hearings and numerous “population assemblies” held throughout the country had preceded the new federal initiatives and had stressed the catastrophic nature of the population “explosion.” Speakers at the gatherings stressed the need for “motivation” and possibly “coercion” to counteract what they regarded as high fertility.2

Mary Calderone, founder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) and one-time medical director of Planned Parenthood, stressed that “family planning practice and contraceptive practice…can…only be applied…in the service of population practice .… [Control of population growth in both developing and developed countries is crucial.”3

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare touted its sex education projects to reduce fertility, especially among minorities.4 Lester Kirkendall, one of the founders of the Sex Information and Education Council, wrote that “sex education is…clearly tied…to family planning and population limitation and policy.” He spoke candidly of the special treatment needed for “lower class families” because of their “ineffective” contraceptive practices.5

Local curriculum guides for sex education were riddled with the “horrors” of overpopulation. Making the connection between overpopulation and contraception explicit, one program for elementary students stipulated: The student will develop a knowledge, awareness, and understanding of the need for mature and responsible decisions regarding population stabilization through the use of contraception:

1. discuss the effects of overpopulation…

a. threat to life — jobs, crowded housing, lack of farmland;

b. long range — famine and eventual death

3. contraception…

b. tell students resources where family planning is available;

c. discuss… pill, IUD, diaphragm, jelly, condom, foam, douching, withdrawal, rhythm…vasectomy and tubal ligation.6

For years, leading promoters of government population control programs, such as Planned Parenthood, have understood that sex education is vital to their goals. In its five-year plan for 1976–1980, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., called for a “zero rate of natural population increase” hand-in-hand with the requisite sex education to “raise the level of awareness among all persons of family planning, human sexuality, population growth, and health in general.”7

In 1977 Planned Parenthood and other groups joined with Zero Population Growth to hammer out a detailed proposal for massive federal grants under the Public Health Services Act, the Social Security Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to finance “fertility control.”8 Subsequently financed by Congress, it provided for “school-based education programs” and “training of faculty” and a spate of other educational ploys premised on the myth of overpopulation.

By the mid-1990’s federal and state governments were spending more than $1 billion annually on domestic population control, with unknown amounts devoted to sex education in a host of programs.

In foreign countries, sex education is vital to the population control programs financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The model program that was designed for Iran and implemented by the Shah of Iran redesigned the school curriculum, rewrote the textbooks, and retrained thousands of teachers to emphasize population reduction and sex education.9

The 1988 contract between Costa Rica and USAID required that the country not only promote contraception but provide sex education in its schools as well.10 The World Bank, leading whip of world population control, acknowledged the importance of education in instilling a “modern” outlook toward family planning.11

The insistence of misguided US foreign policy that sex education be made available in schools throughout the world was one of the sticking points at the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The Draft Programme of the Conference, vehemently supported by the Clinton administration, called for more sex education and “sexual health care” for adolescents without their parents’ supervision or knowledge. Many countries objected to this. A statement by the Islamic Center for Population Studies said that “Islam can by no means agree to give young generations full freedom to do what they like.”12

Sex education is seldom explicitly promoted to the general public as a measure for population control. More commonly, it is concealed behind lofty sounding phrases such as “total physical, mental, and social well-being,”13 or “a spiral of learning experience to establish sexuality as an entity within healthy interpersonal relationships,”14 or even as a way to create the ideal human beings of the future, “not…furtive, exploitive, leering, guilt-ridden, apathetic, compulsive, joyless…not like ourselves”, but “eager, passionate, caring, unafraid, open, responsible, exultant.”15 All of this might make parents wish that more school time were given to literature and grammar.

Since the mid-1970’s in the United States, the blame on “sexual ignorance” for the allegedly high rates of adolescent pregnancy has made good copy for the sale of the new sex programs. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the “research” arm of Planned Parenthood, published two widely disseminated booklets on the so-called teenage pregnancy “epidemic.” The campaign resulted in a flood of new government appropriations for Planned Parenthood, although the adolescent birth rate was, in fact, at its lowest level in forty years.

Statistical studies showed that sex programs actually increased adolescent pregnancy, and mostly in the areas receiving the most lavish expenditures.16 As expected, promiscuity, so-called unwanted pregnancy and the need for abortion increased too. Studies showed that youngsters who received the new instruction were more likely to engage in sexual activity at early ages, but the promoters were undeterred.17

Propaganda for Teens

The failure of the avowed purposes notwithstanding, the programs drove relentlessly toward their real demographic goal. They stressed the desirability of small families, asking children to discuss “the problems that would be eliminated if I were the only child.”18 They taught that “Babies are not sweet little things. They wet and dirty themselves, they get sick, they’re very expensive to take care of.”19 They asked children to decide what to do to solve “the population problem [which] is very serious.”20

They made children learn the telephone numbers of birth control and abortion clinics and bus routes to them.21 They taught children that all services to arrest fertility are freely available on a “confidential” basis — i.e., no one will tell their parents22 — and enlightened them on how to become legally “emancipated” from their parents.23 Children were required to decide whether it is better to have an abortion or to give birth to an unwanted child24 and were taught that “No one has the right to bring an unwanted child into the world.”25

High school students worked as boy-girl pairs on “physiology definition sheets” in which they defined “foreplay”, “erection, ejaculation”, and similar matters. They discussed whether they were satisfied with their “size of sex organs.”26 They filled out questionnaires on the frequency with which they engaged in heavy petting, masturbation, and sexual intercourse. They practiced fitting condoms on cucumbers.27

Why the unremitting invasion of students’ privacy; and, more to the point, how? Since most teachers balk at teaching sex, the typical Planned Parenthood clinic has its own staff of “professional sex educators” who fan out to the schools and earn a large part of the government grants flowing to the clinic while advertising the clinic’s services. Further advancing sex education and birth control among the young, hundreds of schools throughout the nation have established “health” clinics which dispense condoms and pills along with other services.

The programs teach that the traditional family is rapidly disappearing and lead children to discuss their own choices among various so-called lifestyles “intentional communities, the extended family, communes, group marriage, couples living together w/o marriage, single parenthood .…”28

The sex educators recommend masturbation not only in the interests of avoiding pregnancy but also “in developing a sense of the self.”29 Also discouraging parenthood, the instruction stresses the normality of homosexuality and the abnormality of those who disapprove of it, dubbing them as having “homophobia.” Teachers diagnose children as young as age nine as “homosexual” and offer them “support” as such.30

Parents, dismayed at the school sex programs, have attempted to require schools to teach abstinence as the only appropriate behavior for unmarried youth. Planned Parenthood has fiercely resisted. When Duval County Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, adopted an abstinence-based curriculum, Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit and electioneered for school board candidates who would support contraceptive education. The assault lasted four years and ended in a Planned Parenthood “victory.” David Landry and others reported in “Family Planning Perspectives” in November/December 1999 that more than 500 similar local controversies had occurred in all 50 states.31

Nevertheless, parents made some headway. By 1999, the majority of school districts that had a sex education policy required that abstinence be presented as the preferred behavior. This left the sex educators free, however, in most cases also to teach young people to contracept, abort, masturbate, and “come out” as homosexuals. The domestic population control agenda is alive and well.

This article is based on Chapter 5 of Jacqueline Kasun’s book The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999 edition), “Promoting the New Philosophy: the Sex Education Movement.” Part Two of Domestic Population Control, on current legislative initiatives, will appear in the next PRI Review. Dr. Kasun is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.