Health board is teaching children the Baywatch approach to sexuality

TO borrow the words of another former Taoiseach, John Bruton did the State some service last week.

The Meath TD heard on local radio that the North Eastern Health Board planned to launch a series of sex education booklets for school-goers.

He didn't like what he was hearing about their content so he took action.

The booklets, called 4 Boys and 4 Girls, were billed as 'below the belt' and 'below the bra' guides to the male and female bodies.

They were produced in England and imported for the health board by the Irish Family Planning Association.

They assert that there is 'no right age' for minors to begin sexual activity. 4 Boys even fails to mention that it is against the law for a man to have sexual intercourse with a girl aged under 17.

"In view of the widely-reported X-case which, inter alia, involved statutory rape, I would have thought that the North Eastern Health Board would have considered it necessary to give guidance on that aspect of Irish law," Bruton said in a statement.

The health board should not be involved in presenting a "hedonistic view of life", he continued.

"It should not tell children 'your body is yours to share with whoever you choose', as this booklet does, a sentiment that removes sex from any concept of wider responsibility to others," the former Taoiseach declared.

"A booklet directed at children should be fully informative about the mechanics of sex, but it should not divorce sex from relationships and should also tell young people contemplating sex of the need to take full responsibility for their own future, for the future of their partner and for the future of a child that might result."

Bruton has authority to speak on these matters since he has teenage children himself. Unfortunately, the reticence of many other politicians does a disservice to Irish parents.

People want their children to grow up happy, to be mature in their sexual behaviour and to have responsible and loving relationships with the opposite sex.

But some parents feel intimidated by the huge prevalence of sex-related material in the media.

How can their values compete with the solemn pronouncements of 'experts' on radio and TV or with the racy plot-lines of soap operas?

And anyway, don't their children know more than they themselves knew as teenagers?

Teachers and health professionals need to assist parents by talking to teenagers about sex in a way that is informative but also moral.

Politicians should ensure that the right people are given authority to do the job.

Thanks to John Bruton we know that the North Eastern Health Board and the Irish Family Planning Association have been neither responsible nor accountable in their behaviour.

The booklets which the health board proposed to launch, at taxpayers' expense, were never vetted by the elected members of the North Eastern Health Board.

There was no suggestion either that their content was discussed with school managers or with parents' associations.

No doubt the health board meant well. And I am pretty sure that the Irish Family Planning Association means well too.

But we have to ask whether, by promoting a conscience-free, laissez-faire attitude to sex among teenagers, it helps or hinders the task of preventing disease, pregnancy and emotional heartbreak among Irish teenagers.

Catherine Heaney, the chief executive of the IFPA, responded recently in this paper to an article I wrote about sex education.

Her article contained a litany of weak arguments and basic misunderstandings.

For example, she wrote that "after years of trial and error, Britain has learned that abstinence-driven programmes are not effective."

She went on to credit Britain's current "holistic approach to sex education and service provision" with reducing teenage pregnancies by 9% in the last three years.

Can she be serious?

The British health authorities may well have achieved small reductions in Britain's world-beating levels of teenage pregnancy by free and easy use of the morning-after pill, but they are in a state of near panic about rising rates of sexually transmitted infections, some of which no pill can cure.

Heaney also seemed unaware that the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the international planned parenthood movement of which her organisation is a part, is not nearly so grudging about the abstinence-based programmes as she is.

The Guttmacher Institute attributes the drop in teenage pregnancies in the US in part to abstinence programmes.

So does the US Government, which plans to spend about $120 million on such education this year.

Even the British Government, contrary to the IFPA's understanding of things, is slowly coming around to the view that contraceptives are not the answer to teenage sexual health.

Some months back the British Government published a strategy document which includes the goal of ensuring that three-quarters of 16-year-old girls in Northern Ireland are not sexually active.

THE Irish Family Planning Association will be of no assistance at all in the achievement of this goal. Their booklets are high on sexual liberalism and self-protection. Note that word 'self'.

"Sunshine and sex come naturally," Catherine Heaney wrote in this paper. "The trick is to respect them and protect yourself if things heat up."

This is the Baywatch view of human sexuality true in its assertion that sex is great, but utterly false in its claim that self-protection is the only thing that matters.

Yet the Baywatch fans don't even succeed in getting people to protect themselves.

Catherine Heaney boasts that the IFPA has been working to promote good sexual and reproductive health in Ireland for 34 years.

But in that time, our rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases have all increased dramatically. They have nothing to show for their efforts.

Ironically, the IFPA rightly identifies ignorance about sex as one of the reasons why, by the age of 16, about 25% of Irish teenagers have had sexual intercourse.

But having trumpeted the importance of information, they then allow ideology to restrict the information they themselves are willing to impart to teenagers.

They refuse to tell teenagers that sex and love should go together and that sex in certain circumstances is against the law.

They fail to tell teenagers that condoms have a high failure rate (for example, your chance of contracting gonorrhoea or chlamydia would only be reduced by half, even with perfect condom use).

They also omit to mention that early sexual activity leads to a huge amount of emotional heartbreak for teenagers.

According to a new study by the American Heritage Foundation, one quarter of sexually-active girls aged 14-17 said they felt depressed a lot or all of the time in the previous week, compared to 7.7% of virgins.

Not surprisingly, fewer boys only 8% among the sexually active felt depressed. This tells us something we already knew.

Too much intimacy, too soon, is worse for teenage girls than it is for boys.

But don't expect the IFPA to spread the word among teenager girls. That, you see, would require them to endorse abstinence-based approaches.

"I regret to say," says John Bruton, "that I have concluded that the IFPA are not the right people to be preparing tax-funded leaflets on sexual relations for distribution to 12-16-year-olds.

"They lack sufficient common sense, and sufficient social and moral judgement for such a sensitive and moral task."

He understates.