Much has been written lately about teen pregnancy and sex education in Westbrook. Some fictions are not worth rebutting. Others however, need correction, particularly when they originate from persons in authority in the Westbrook School Department and thus carry added weight and dangers. Failure to speak the truth about teen pregnancy in Westbrook is putting our children at risk.
On March 1, an article in this paper announced a public hearing on the subject of teaching contraception at Wescott Junior High School. The reason given by the health curriculum coordinator was “Over the last 10 years, the pregnancy rate has gone up,” she said. “It hasn’t gone down.”
Independent health professionals were alarmed by this misinformation. The data presented to the public were old, and contradicted recent experience. Concerned parents contacted the Maine Bureau of Health. The facts are conclusive.
Starting in 1998 and going through 2004, the actual numbers of teenage pregnancies in Westbrook each year are: 40, 31, 32, 30, 24, 23 and 10. Far from confirming the School District’s contention that rates have “gone up” during the past five years, these numbers reflect a rate that is declining sharply. The truth is that under the current program of teaching sexual abstinence in the junior high, teen pregnancy rates in Westbrook are down sharply, and they are declining much faster than the Maine state averages.
Looking into the numbers more carefully, we see that most pregnancies in teens occur in 18- and 19-year-old women, about two out of three, according to state averages. So, most of the peak in 1998, was due to pregnancies in young women who passed through Wescott junior high in the early 1990s. What was going on then?
According to the public testimony of school officials, the early
1990s were a time when Westbrook was experimenting with teaching contraception to junior high students. Is it possible that teaching contraception to such young students led to earlier sexual experimentation? Is it also true that pregnancy rates then increased as growing numbers of sexually active kids matured and made their way through the system?
Westbrook’s decline in teen pregnancy since switching back to
abstinence is not unusual. Genuine character-based abstinence
education programs have repeatedly been shown to be effective in delaying and reducing sexual activity among young students.
Conversely, teaching contraception has the opposite effect and
actually increases rates of sexual activity. According to the
testimony of a former contraception educator and clinic owner, Carol Everett, teaching junior high teens about contraception was “good for business” and caused “the phones to ring” at her contraception and abortion clinics, as teens too young to drive sought out birth control pills and other “services.”
So, knowing that Westbrook teen pregnancy rates have declined since switching to abstinence education, and knowing that contraception teaching increases teen sexual activity, why are some Westbrook School Officials continuing to advocate teaching contraception to 12 year olds?
We don’t know the answer to this, but we’ll have a chance to ask on Monday night, May 22, at 6:30 p.m., when the School Curriculum Committee will meet to consider adoption of a controversial and unhealthy contraceptive curriculum for junior high kids. Will school administrators vote to adopt a program that destroys the innocence of children and entices them into sexual activity, or will we retain and strengthen a genuine abstinence education curriculum that has given Westbrook one of the most impressive declines in teen pregnancy rates that Maine has seen?
The meeting will be in the Superintendent’s Office on Stroudwater Street, next to the High School.
George Rodrigues
Westbrook
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