How to Talk to a Republican #3 - Sex Education

First, Cliff, if you're reading this, I didn't crib your title and I hope, since I haven't read your column, I'm not plagiarizing your material. For those of you who don't read Huffington Post regularly, Cliff Schecter wrote a post there of the same name. Any resemblance of the material I'm writing to Cliff's is purely coincidental, accidental and I hope, complementary.

Sex Education is a difficult topic for Republicans, particularly the Republicans you and I are likely to talk with. The ones at the top get adequate sex education, have access to contraception and, if the old aspirin between the knees trick fails, clean, safe abortions. Now abortion, or at least attempts at it, have been around since God invented unintended pregnancy. Contraception, too, was a long sought-after goal until the 1960's, when the Pill became the first-ever form of cheap, reliable birth control. That should have relegated abortion to a rare procedure, generally used to save a mother's life as it did in Europe.

It didn't here. See, Republicans, particularly religious right Republicans, have no interest whatsoever in stopping abortions. They're not particularly interested in a right to life, either, more on that later. What they're interested in is controlling sexual behavior, in short, limiting it to religiously and legally sanctioned unions - marriage. They really believe that teaching their daughters and sons (to a lesser degree) abstinence as the only form of contraception to be practiced by young, unmarried persons will somehow work. Never mind that it hasn't worked throughout human history and that God made sex a lot of fun to tempt the faithful, they think that by preaching an aspirin between a girl's knees works, it will.

So ban abortion, that'll work, right? If it were that simple. In a recently published study in The Lancet, abortion rates were found to be lowest in countries with legal abortions. Furthermore, the abortions performed there were safe, unlike the more frequent and more dangerous abortions performed in countries where abortion is legal. So, if you want to decrease the number of abortions, legalize it, right?

Not so simple. The US and Canada had 21 abortions per thousand pregnancies in 2003. In western Europe, where the procedure is also legal, the number was about half that. The Netherlands is the country with the lowest abortion rate at 4 per one thousand, about one-fifth of ours. Why?

1. They have universal, fact based sex education in schools.
2. They have a universal acceptance of the fact that sex is fun, a normal human activity and can be practiced simply for the enjoyment of it.
3. They have universal, free access to contraception.

Bet your preacher didn't tell you that one.

So bottom line, there are two ways to stop abortion. One is easy and ineffective - outlaw it. The other is more complex and effective - go the Dutch route. Liberal thinking may be convoluted at times but this engineer sees a direct correlation between the actions and the results. So if your goal is to reduce abortions, go Dutch.

We'll talk about "right to life" tomorrow.