Sarah Palin faced a variety of questions at last week's debate, but not the one I would have asked: "Should public school students be taught that contraception and condoms can prevent unintended pregnancy and disease?"
Palin has referred to her teenage daughter's pregnancy as a normal "up and down" of family life. Sympathetic politicians and commentators, including Bill Clinton, have concurred, attributing teenage pregnancies to "raging hormones" and saying that since the couple plans to marry, Bristol Palin's pregnancy is really an early awakening to adult responsibilities.
But left obscured by the raging-hormones explanation is the fact that teen pregnancy is far from inevitable. Like some other controversies at the heart of the culture wars, this problem -- which, after receding nationally since the early 1990s, appears to be worsening again -- need not exist. High teen pregnancy rates result in part from our inability to talk honestly and wisely about teen sexuality. And they are exacerbated by policies that prohibit such talk.
American teenagers grow up in environments that inhibit them from making conscious choices about sex and using contraception effectively. Sarah Palin supports programs that contribute to that environment, favoring policies that prohibit teachers from explaining the benefits of contraception and condoms and that require teaching that sex outside of marriage is unacceptable.
Such "abstinence-until-marriage" policies are built on the myth of a past when people did not have sex until they were married and, this thinking goes, prevented many of the troubles that plague society today. But for more than half a century, the majority of Americans have been having premarital sex. In the 1950s, one in three teenage mothers conceived out of wedlock. And many "shotgun" marriages ended in divorce.
Teenage parents face an even taller order today; it is no longer as easy for a man without a college degree to get a well-paying job to provide for a family, and young women rightly expect to pursue their talents both inside and outside the home, a challenge to pull off without higher education.
Simply put, the circumstances and aspirations of young people have changed since the 1950s, but our society's narratives about the place of sexuality and the nature of relationships do not reflect these changes. And we pay a price for that inability to talk realistically about teenage sexuality and love.
Just how steep, and unnecessary, that price is becomes clear when we look at countries where teenagers do not pay it. In the Netherlands, young people become sexually active at the same age as their American and other counterparts across the developed world -- around 17 -- but teenage pregnancy rates are six times lower than they are here.
