The Pro-Teen-Pregnancy Movement Has Taken Over the Trump Administration
I thought we’d already seen the worst possible way to teach sex education. MAGA has found a way to make it worse.
July 28, 20265:45 AM
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Like many millennials, I grew up at the peak of the American abstinence education movement and the American evangelical obsession with virginity. Sex education curriculum across the country compared sexually active women to chewed-up gum, manhandled roses, and cups of spit, often culminating with a teacher holding up a saliva-filled glass or broken flower and asking, “Who would want this?” (“People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” read one guide). More than 80 percent of programs contained information that was either seriously misleading or straight-up wrong, including that HIV can be contracted by sweat and tears and that condoms are ineffective. Christian youth groups pushed True Love Waits and sold “purity rings” for fathers to buy their daughters to eventually be changed out for a wedding ring, in one of the more literal representations of patriarchal control over women’s bodies I’ve seen to date. Like millions of other teen and adolescent girls in the ’90s and early 2000s, I too took a virginity pledge well before I could even conceptualize why sex might be appealing.
