When Talking to Your Kids About Sex, Don't Listen to Gwyneth
Listen to a sex educator, like me
I’ve already written about Gwyneth Paltrow and why it might not be a good idea to follow her—or Goop’s—advice on sexual health. You might end up with burns from your steamed vagina, a bacterial infection from your yoni egg, or a giant bill for a gold vibrator (not to mention your vagina-scented candle might explode). So, I suppose it’s not all that surprising that her advice on providing sex education to your children also misses the mark. On a recent podcast, she explained that she didn’t ever have the sex talk with her kids: “At their elementary school here in Los Angeles where they went, they gave them the most comprehensive sex-ed class in the 6th grade. They came home and they had been taught everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. It was wild." Leaving sex ed to schools is not a good idea. Most schools don’t have comprehensive sex education, and even those that do can’t talk to your kids about your family values around things like love, relationships, gender, and marriage (and where sex plays into all of that). Your goal as a parent is to let your kids know you are there for them if they have questions and they can’t know that if you keep quiet and let the school take over. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent a career advocating for comprehensive sex education in school, but that’s only part of it. Parents really matter (remember the study that found that if you don’t educate your kids about sex, porn will). Plus, if you wait until 6th grade, you’ve missed so many valuable opportunities to normalize sex and talking about sex. Which brings me to the other celebrity who got it wrong this week—Wonder Woman. On a talk show Gal Gadot said that she explained her pregnancy to her daughter by saying “daddy planted a seed in mommy’s tummy.” Nope. Tell this to a kid and they may end up thinking that swallowing a watermelon seed will make them grow a baby in their stomach. My own attempt to explain my pregnancy to my then-four-year-old ended with her convinced her little sister was in an egg, so I can’t claim to be perfect. But I can tell you that she knew that said egg was in my uterus and that the baby would eventually come out of my vagina. And, a few months later when she asked how the sperm got to the egg, I told her (though I did giggle just a bit). Little kids may get the facts wrong, but they will learn that you are someone who tells them the truth and that sex is not a taboo topic. Both of these lessons will go a long way.
Access to Birth Control Increases High School Graduation Rates
In 2008, Colorado got a $27 million grant from a private donor to expand access to long-acting-reversible contraceptives (LARCs) to low-income women across the state. By the middle of 2015, this program, called the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, gave the contraceptive implant or an IUD to 36,000 women across the state at little or no cost. We already know that the program was a success—research has found that in its first five years, the state birth rate declined nearly 50% among teens ages 15-19 and 20% among those 20-24. As a result of fewer births, the state saved between 54.6 and 60.6 million dollars on four entitlement programs.
Now we know that program had another benefit—high school graduation rates in Colorado increased. The number of young women in the state who dropped out of high school before graduating decreased by 14%, and the percentage of women with a high school diploma increased from 88% to 92%. In a new study, published in Science Advances, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, say that an additional 3,800 young women born between 1994 and 1996 graduated from high school and that about half of this gain was a result of the contraception access program.
To calculate this, the researchers used data from the U.S. Census to compare graduation rates before and after the program was implemented and then compared these to the outcomes of women in 17 other states that had similar graduation rates. The authors used an analysis method called “difference-in-difference” and calculated that the expanded access to contraception “was associated with statistically significant 1.66 percentage-point increase in high school graduation.”
Those of us who advocate for sex education and access to contraception for teenagers have been saying for years that making birth control available will help improve educational outcomes. The logic seems obvious—if you have access to contraception you can avoid unintended pregnancies, and if you don’t get pregnant before you want to, you can stay in school and pursue further educational opportunities.
It’s similar to the much-talked-about connection between the invention of the pill in the 1960s and the women’s movement. If you can control the timing of your pregnancies, you can stay in the workforce, and if you stay in the workforce, you can advance in your career. (For an excellent look at this, read The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig or listen to Terry Gross’s 2014 interview with him on Fresh Air.)
However, this connection between access to birth control and high school graduation had never been made through research before. Amanda Stevenson, the lead author of the study, explained that up until now these claims have been anecdotal: “One of the foundational claims among people who support greater access to contraception is that it improves women’s ability to complete their education and, in turn, improves their lives. This study is the first to provide rigorous, quantitative, contemporary evidence that it’s true.”
Dr. Stevenson hopes that this research will give policymakers across the country renewed interest in funding contraception and new language to explain why it’s important: “When these arguments are based solely on the effect of contraception on fertility, it implies that poor women shouldn’t have children. Our findings suggest that better access to contraception improves women’s lives.”
The research team is now looking the Colorado program to determine if access to birth control impacts women’s futures beyond high school, such as increasing their chances of going to and graduate from college, improving their long-term income, and reducing the likelihood they will live in poverty.
Biden Administration Reverses a Trump Anti-Trans Health Care Rule
Gay and transgender people are once again protected against discrimination in health care according to a policy announced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday. The policy affirms that federal laws forbidding sex discrimination in health care services protect gay and transgender people which is in sharp contrast to the Trump Administration which had specifically said “sex” only meant gender assigned at birth.
The debate about the meaning of the word sex in this context has actually been going on since 2010 when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included anti-discrimination language that prohibited bias “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability.” The Obama Administration argued that this covered transgender individuals, but because of lawsuits and injunctions, this never fully went into effect. Then came the Trump Administration which proposed a rewrite of the definition to specifically exclude trans people—it went into effect last June.
But now we have Biden. Moreover, we have a Supreme Court Decision that says gay and transgender workers are covered by a 1960s civil rights law (though this ruling was unrelated to health care it sets a good direction). HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in the department’s statement: “The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
He added: “Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences. Everyone — including LGBTQ people — should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
The new policy should apply to any program that receives federal money from HHS including subsidies, grants, or insurance contacts.
This is why elections matter. As state legislatures across the country try to roll back civil rights and basic human decency, the Biden Administration is leading by example.