At issue is an educational book which teaches girls how to chart their fertility cycle. It isn’t a book promoting “natural family planning” as the only acceptable birth control, and it clearly states that protection should be used during intercourse. But it does teach girls how to track their fertility, and how to know which days are more fertile, when they’re ovulating, and so on. I’m with Planned Parenthood’s Vanessa Collins on this: it’s always a good thing for people (teenagers or adults, boys or girls) to know more about how their bodies work, and keeping girls ignorant about their reproductive systems is incredibly unhealthy.
Expert reactions to the book tend to track political views on comprehensive sex education vs. the abstinence-only approach. Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, takes the line that better-informed teenagers make better decisions: “Time and again,” she says, “research has shown that giving information to adolescents about reproduction and sexuality will not lead to promiscuity and will only arm teens with information that they need whenever they decide to become sexually active.”
Unsurprisingly, abstinence-only crusaders object to any efforts to actually teach girls about sexuality and their bodies, and believe it’s “inappropriate” to tell them that there’s anything other than an empty mysterious void between their belly-button and their knees:
But Janice Crouse, senior fellow at Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, disagrees. “I think it is inappropriate. Instead, I think that we need high ideals for our teenagers, to teach them the value of self-control because those are disciplines that you need for your whole life. Providing this type of information says that teenagers are hostages to their hormones.”
If you don’t tell teenagers that they have hormones, they just won’t feel them! If you don’t tell girls that they’re fertile, they just won’t get pregnant! What could go wrong?