Mississippi, a Southern, Republican, Protestant state with abstinence-only education mandated in public schools, suffers from the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Liberals love to parade this statistic, usually garnered from the National Center for Health Statistics (2010), as evidence that abstinence education has failed. Schools should teach teenagers to use contraceptives instead, the argument goes, so that young women can avoid dropping out of high school with a baby in arms and no husband. Teenagers will sleep around one way or another, they shrug, so we should teach them how to do it with minimal consequences.
Perhaps abstinence education has failed — not because we ought to give American youth over to the lusts of their bodies and have done with it, but because abstinence education neglects the moral habits that fortify marriages and families.
Moral laws exist so that we can attain the good. Otherwise they are subjective standards, imposed by personal belief systems. Without recognition of its intended good, abstinence amounts to little more than a refusal. Abstinence education often suggests that teenagers, flush with hormones and bombarded with provocative images, words, and ideas, should stare temptation in the eye and just say no. The ability to resist bodily desires does indicate a certain strength of will, but the lack of context collapses abstinence into futile resistance to a force of nature with an arbitrary deadline — after which we may indulge ourselves freely. Youth pastors recount stories of students posing the question, “How far can I go?” Last month, I heard of a couple that decided to marry within months of their first meeting, so that they could be together without living in sin. Both of these attitudes reveal an impoverished understanding of the good that abstinence education is trying to achieve.
We encourage teenagers to practice abstinence because it protects the person from selfish use. To accomplish that goal, however, the practice of abstinence must be rooted in love that affirms the human person. People are creatures made by God for their own sake, not for use as a means of gaining emotional or physical pleasure. How we love matters most when it comes to acts that unite two bodies in one flesh and potentially lead to the begetting of new persons. If teenagers understood how to love people, it would transform their self-images as well as their decisions about romance, friendship, and family. Leaving aside the question of the government’s role in education, we can acknowledge that what programs do exist should make the best case possible for love and the moral habits that spring from it, as these protect both individuals and society.
Imagine that one of the teenage couples from Mississippi had loved each other and themselves according to their personhood. She dressed in a manner worthy of respect. He touched her only to affirm his affection without exciting lust. They both ordered their thoughts towards willing the good for each other. Singly and together, they behaved such that the moment never arrived when they found themselves hidden in the dark, with nothing between them and the brink but a shallow and reflexive “no.”