More than 40 students and community members squeezed into the Collier Lounge on Tuesday night to listen to a panel discussion on approaches to sex education. Sponsored by the Hamilton Think Tank, the Community Conversation featured eight panelists, including advocates of safe-sex education and program directors from a federally-funded abstinence-only program called Stop and Think.
Private health consultant Jessica Bogli, who previously worked with the Oregon Department of Education, emphasized health education focused on giving students skills to make the decisions that are best for them.
Youths are interested in sexual education, she said. “It’s not as if you walk into a classroom, approach students with sex education and they respond, ‘Oh! I haven’t even thought about it. Thank you for reminding me!’”
Bogli advocated teaching safe sex with an emphasis on abstinence as a first choice and said that educators must reach students at a young age, because they “need to start prevention two years before the initiation of the behavior.”
Janae Schiller, youth action counselor for Planned Parenthood and a senior at North Eugene High School, said that in the world of today, “We’re making a big deal out of something that is very natural. How many of you are a product of sex?
“Our culture promotes sex but we’re getting abstinence-only education and people are confused.”
Mary Gossart, a 26-year-old veteran health educator at Planned Parenthood, said the organization offers a research-based perspective on the subject of safe sex.
“The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancies, unintended births and abortions in the industrialized world,” she said.
Why?
Part of the problem, she said, is abstinence-only education. She said framing the issue of sexuality in terms of abstinence or safe-sex education is problematic and “young people bear the brunt of that.”
University senior and peer health counselor Sara Wee discussed the “disconnect in talking about sex in small communities” where many public health issues “remain taboo.”
Wee’s idea of the most effective sex education is empowering people by giving them choices with a reminder that they don’t have to have sex.
She said open communication in sex education is important, emphasizing, “Don’t deliver ultimatums or condemn people before you know their experiences.”
Brother John-Marie Bingham, a Dominican resident seminarian at Eugene’s Newman Center, said, “We can’t separate our sexuality from who we are. … The human person is designed to love and be loved.”
He supports safe sex education with an emphasis on abstinence, which the Catholic Church advocates.
He found fault with safe-sex education that merely promotes the use of condoms and birth control, which he said gives those being educated a sense of false “invulnerability,” and a belief that they can have sex without consequences.
Statistically speaking, he said, people don’t follow through with safe sex practices and “the only way to be completely safe is abstinence only.”
Bingham said the Catholic Church understands sex only in the true context of love, where you choose to “freely give all of yourself to someone else.”
In the eyes of the Church, he said, it is possible to “redirect sexual energy to other tasks, such as serving others.”
Reverend Melanie Oommen of the First Congregation of the United Church of Christ in Eugene teaches a 27-week, abstinence-based course for eighth-graders in the congregation.
All churches are “uncomfortable” talking about sexuality, she said, but “silence speaks very loudly” and can cause “shame and confusion.”
Oommen said “it is not up to me to tell them what is appropriate but to provide comprehensive education” and be a “non-judgmental listener.”
She advocates that churches take an active stance on sexual education, believing that “a religious community can be a place where you can bring your whole self.”
Willow Dodd is Eugene’s Program Director for Stop and Think, which promotes abstinence until marriage as the “safest and healthiest choice” for youth. She said she begins her Stop and Think presentations to seventh through 12th grade students with “sex is bad, gross and awful,” and works backward from there.
Dodd said she defines abstinence to students as withholding from all sexual activity, not just physical intercourse, “which is usually when their jaws hit the floor and I lose every friend I had in the classroom.”
She said the program’s ultimate goal is to get students “to be in control and not be controlled by outside influences.”
Jed Johnson, Stop and Think’s Program Director in Salem, said, “Our goal is that students not adopt our views, but find their own. We know we’re only one part of a world full of different ideologies and approaches.”