YORBA LINDA — Thanks to some inappropriate talking and staple-throwing, the uniformed 13- and 14-year-olds at Bernardo Yorba Middle School have been made to sit for roll call. When they are quiet, the teacher introduces today's guest speaker, a friendly looking woman in a short skirt, who also, they are told, suffered the consequences of imperfect behavior.
Her problem, however, was sex.
Some kids look alarmed, others shake their heads in sympathy, as Mary Slosted, 42, leads them through her roller coaster life of childhood molestation, sex at 16 in the back seat of a Volkswagen, two abortions, depression, suicidal thoughts, anorexia and overeating, marriage and divorce and, finally, redemption through sexual abstinence.
After her divorce, she tells the students, she didn't have sex for nine years until she remarried at age 37. Then, she confides to a few snickers, it was an exciting "all-night affair."
Slosted represents Choices, a private, Fullerton-based program that teaches students they should wait until they are married to have sex. Programs like Choices, whose 20 speakers brought its message of chastity last year to 17,000 students in Orange County, are changing the face of sex education in the United States.
If teaching sexual abstinence sounded hopelessly dated a few years ago, it is now blessed by federal and state governments. With $500 million in public funds, hundreds of new programs are instructing children that premarital sex will likely have "harmful psychological and physical effects" and that condoms and other contraceptives are unreliable. Even California, the only state to reject federal money for abstinence-only programs, has funded Choices with about $400,000.
As such programs proliferate, they are challenging the long-established trinity of sex education--human sexuality, safe sex and birth control. This turn of events has led some religious conservatives to proclaim victory over what they see as the corrosive effects of the '60s. "The sexual revolution came and went and sex lost," declares Leslee Unruh, president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, S.D., which has counted about 1,000 abstinence programs nationwide. "This is our moment in time."
In the last two years, 698 new abstinence-only programs and 21 new media campaigns have been funded by the federal government with state matching funds. In Chicago, where teen pregnancy rates have soared to 40%, a new curriculum adopted last fall teaches abstinence as the best choice, rather than one of several options. Sweetwater, Texas, population 12,000, has created a position for an "abstinence education coordinator."
