The Harm Done By NOT Providing Sex Education

She was twenty four, and beautiful – magazine cover, MTV video beautiful — with long black hair and exotic features.  She was telling me about her childhood abuse, her drug abuse, and how she left childhood for pregnancy and married a husband who was in many ways more abusive than her own parents had been with her.

Although the precise details do not matter, this woman gradually revealed herself to be a victim of physical, emotional, and sexual battering so severe that that she actually looked back fondly on her time spent in a variety of foster homes.  I rarely hear this.  She told about her abuse with a certain flatness of facial expression and vocal tone, a certain acceptance.  This is not uncommon in those who have survived a lot of emotional abuse.  It is a survival mechanism; a way to put up a wall.  I could understand that.

She was actually a fairly reasonable person to interview.  She did not have many holes in her memory and managed to answer most of my questions with believable facts.  I had to ask about her education.  She had been doing well in school when she dropped out because of pregnancy.  She had not used contraception then, still didn’t.  When I asked her, she told me simply that since her family was Christian, such topics were not discussed.

She said she had known nothing about contraception when her children had been conceived.  She had been instructed to abstain and simply found that she could not.

Now she was trying to get access to her children, aged 7 and 9.  But with her history of psychosis and drug abuse, it was not going to be simple.  I think it is actually possible, if she works hard enough, to stop the voices and get off psych medicines and ultimately, work a program that could convince the court that she could safely have access to those children.  My worry was that she was on heavy doses of psychotropic drugs that could cause birth defects if she became pregnant again.  (She had not been on psychotropic drugs when she had her two children, who sounded pretty normal.)

She finally said she was not all that sexually active, her boyfriend was out of town.  She did not believe in abortion, so she felt she must not get pregnant.  She almost went to Planned Parenthood, but it was somehow foreboding.  Not that it was their fault.

She never got near the building.

My frustration level was rising.  She promised to take advantage of her boyfriend being out of town to go to Planned Parenthood, after I read her the riot act.  She was so psychotic, hearing such uncomfortable voices telling her to hurt herself and others, there was no question of withholding or even temporizing with her anti-psychotic medication.  In a world where many of us are touched by the plight of children, how many of us have paused to inquire how or when they are conceived?

The story of this woman is a common one.  People who hope for sexual abstinence in their children and who teach that as behavior, are generally not teaching contraception.  If they speak of it at all, they often do so in a disparaging way or perpetuate harmful myths.  We humans are not angels, and biology often wins out over theology – even in those with the purest intentions.

A good model here is the Freudian one of the three parts of the psyche.  Although I am surprised how many people still think that psycho-analysis should be the daily bread of psychiatry, but here the model helps.

There is the “id,” which is our animal urges.  If you are really angry at someone, at work for example, you may say “I could kill that guy.”  But the probability is overwhelming that you will not.  The reason you are unlikely to do so will be the “superego;” the ideals, the religion, the perfection we would like to believe we can all live.

The “ego” — the conscious self — goes schlogging through life, trying to satisfy the animal urges while doing well enough with the ideals and perfect stuff to at least avoid social isolation or punishments.  Perhaps displaying anger, avoiding murder.

Sex is a strong animal urge, right up there much stronger than murder. The species must survive, and the instincts that promote the survival of our species must be primordial  “We gotta live” urges.  So when someone starts having sexual urges, they might not be able to hold back.

This is not a new idea.  This has been a major theme of history.  From the mistresses (or male lovers) of the wealthy to the cruising for “hooking up” on the streets or in nightclubs, it is a constant theme.

If the great superego and ideals could have stopped this from being a cornerstone of human social life, I suspect it would have already happened.  A realistic, intelligent approach to the teaching of sexuality could help a large number of problems.  In other words – Sex Education.

Since we have contraception, since we have the capacity to separate the ability to generate offspring from the satisfaction of a physical urge, the idea of children born into difficult and abusive situations should be curtailed if not eliminated.  The fact this has not happened is a testament to the non-rational nature of the human race.

I am not sure how to pierce the impenetrable wall of religious belief and the actions based upon it.  These actions, such as failing to teach young people basic information about human reproduction, have a capacity to generate human misery that is greater than anybody wants to believe.  We know that religious crusading can kill people.  We should have picked up on this one a long time ago, when people had wars of that name.

Religion does, admittedly, have the ability to inspire people to high spiritual activities.  It also has the power to end human life; or just a little more subtly, to destroy its quality.  The life of the patient described above, and probably that of her children, has caused pain indescribable, which must be multiplied by the large number of people who have unplanned pregnancies out of ignorance that determine the circumstances of their lives.

In addition to its obvious necessity for procreation, sexual activity seems to confer a large variety of health benefits.  Although I am still conservative enough to believe that one partner to a customer is generally an extremely healthy way to proceed, sex just might be too good a thing to miss.