Passage 7 The Sex Education in America
美国的性教育 《时代周刊》

[00:00]South Carolina is the only state in the country
[00:04]that mandates a certain number of hours
[00:06]that schools must devote to sexuality education.
[00:12]In 2004, a school district in Anderson County decided to do even more.
[00:19]The district partnered with a local teen-pregnancy-prevention organization
[00:24]to implement an innovative relationship and sex-education curriculum
[00:29]that runs through all three years of middle school and into high school,
[00:34]as well as an after-school program for at-risk kids.
[00:39]And that's when the life of Jewels Morris-Davis began to turn around.
[00:45]Later this spring, Congress will dive once more into the war
[00:50]over sex education when it decides whether to eliminate $176 million
[00:58]in federal funding for so-called abstinence-only programs,
[01:03]which instruct kids to delay sex until marriage.
[01:08]Advocates will debate at top volume the merits of abstinence only efforts vs.
[01:14]more comprehensive programs that also teach about birth control
[01:19]and sexually transmitted infections.
[01:23]These arguments miss the point.
[01:26]We now have a pretty good sense of which sex-education approaches work.
[01:32]Substantial research--including a 2007 Bush Administration report
[01:39]has concluded that comprehensive programs
[01:42]are most effective at changing teen sexual behaviors.
[01:47]They are also largely uncontroversial outside Washington.
[01:53]Vast majorities of parents favor teaching comprehensive sex education.
[02:00]South Carolina has reflected the overall trend of falling teen-sex statistics:
[02:07]birthrates in the state fell 27% from 1991 to 2006.
[02:15]But it still lags behind,
[02:17]with teen birthrates almost 12 points above the national average.
[02:22]Those numbers alarmed a group of women at the local United Way
[02:27]in Anderson County, a semirural,
[02:30]conservative community that is home to 175,000 people.
[02:37]So in 2004 they contacted Impact,
[02:42]a teen-pregnancy-prevention organization in the area,
[02:46]to find out what they could do to help. "They had a curriculum,"
[02:50]remembers Carol Burdette, executive director of United Way of Anderson County.
[02:57]"They told us, 'We know this works, but we can't get into the schools.'"
[03:04]In 1988, South Carolina passed the Comprehensive Health Education Act,
[03:11]which requires sexuality education from elementary school through high school,
[03:18]including at least 12.5 hours of
[03:22]"reproductive health and pregnancy prevention education"
[03:26]at some point during a student's high school years.
[03:30]It doesn't limit teachers to abstinence-only lessons;
[03:35]rather, it allows each school district to make its own decisions
[03:40]about what sex education should involve.
[03:44]But with federal funding limited to abstinence-only programs,
[03:48]local districts have a powerful incentive
[03:52]to restrict their sex-education curriculum.