In spring 2012, the Tennessee House of Representatives was embroiled in a debate about the sexual bases.
Republicans were pushing a piece of legislation requiring “family life curriculum” in public schools to adhere to certain guidelines. In particular, it stated that the curriculum must “emphatically promote only sexual risk avoidance through abstinence” and must not “promote, implicitly or explicitly, any gateway sexual activity” or “provide or distribute materials on school grounds that condone, encourage or promote student sexual activity among unmarried students.”
The bill had already passed the state Senate, with its sponsors insisting that it was not an abstinence-only bill, and that it simply clarified existing state laws. The bit that had the House riled up weeks later, though, was a codified list of so-called “gateway sexual activity” that educators would not be allowed to “promote, implicitly or explicitly.” Lacking the votes to do anything but troll their opposition, Democrats went about baiting Republicans into reading the list of so-called gateway sex acts out loud. Despite all their hypocritical private behavior, which we are always learning more about, state Republican leadership must pretend to be uncomfortable with these sorts of things, so they refused. Moreover, there was a group of schoolchildren visiting the chamber that day, and no one wanted to violate the legislation before it was even passed into law.
The bill did pass into law, and the episode — which attracted the attention of late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert — has faded from political memory. But it typified the way state leaders approach educating teens about sex: Don’t do it, don’t talk about it, and don’t talk about what we’re talking about. Although a number of states require sex-ed curriculum to include discussions of consent, Tennessee does not. (After all, discussing consent as an important part of sexual activity could be construed as condoning sexual activity, right?)
This approach remains the law in Tennessee despite the fact that studies have found no evidence that abstinence-only sex education leads to increased sexual abstinence. That said, Tennessee has seen teen pregnancy rates and teen birth rates decline dramatically over the past 25 years. That mirrors the trend nationally, wherein teen birth rates hit a record low in 2017.
It’s not clear why — although some obvious factors come to mind.
“Although reasons for the declines are not totally clear, evidence suggests these declines are due to more teens abstaining from sexual activity, and more teens who are sexually active using birth control than in previous years,” says the Centers for Disease Control, laying out the data on its website. “Still, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher than in other western industrialized nations, and racial/ethnic and geographic disparities in teen birth rates persist.”
In Nashville, according to the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program, the teen birth rate — measured in births per 1,000 girls ages 15-19 — is 31. The county with the highest teen birth rate in the state is Lake County, at 71. Williamson County — notably one of the wealthiest counties in the country — has the lowest at 6. The data also reveals racial and ethnic disparities that are no doubt entangled with inequality in society: The teen birth rate among black Nashville teens is nearly double that of white teens, while the teen birth rate among Hispanic Nashville teens is more than triple the rate of their white counterparts.
Some defenders of Tennessee’s sex-ed policies might be inclined to point to declining teen birth and pregnancy rates as a sign of success. But Lyndsay Godwin, the assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality, says those headline-grabbing trends can obscure other important developments.
“What we know is that pregnancy rates might’ve gone down, but our STI rates have gone up,” Godwin says. “Our gonorrhea and chlamydia rates are going up, in specifically the age range of teenagers into young adults. That’s a piece of the puzzle folks are oftentimes not talking about.”
Godwin has also worked in sex education with Planned Parenthood. She defines the “comprehensive sexuality education” that she and the community organizations she works with want as “education that honors each individual’s value, and gives people the tools and the skills to make decisions that are right for their values and their relationships.” On the contrary, she says, the state’s policies and approach — heavily influenced by conservative Christian ideas about sexuality — appear focused on “controlling and moralizing bodies in a particular way.”
“The problem, though — and we continue to see research around this — is that when we regulate that with abstinence-focused education that is oftentimes based in shame, people still enact the sexual behaviors that they’re trying to keep people from doing,” she says, “oftentimes with less protection, and without the skills to communicate clearly what they want and don’t want.”
