Oh Peter Hitchens, when will you learn?

I want to start off by saying that I don't have a Peter Hitchens obsession. I don't hang around his house. I don't want to steal his clothes off his washing line to keep as little souvenirs. I have no intention of turning this blog into a line by line rebuttal of everything he ever commits to his word processor. However when he starts pulling these articles out of his arse. I feel honour bound to step in.

More sex education means more teenage pregnancies. Always.

A pretty bold statement of fact if ever there was one. He goes on to say.

"Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it"

He means in the context of these figures from the Office of National Statistics, that in 2007 the number of teen pregnancies in the UK has risen (albeit very slightly. 1 baby born per 1000 to mothers aged 15 to 17.). However the figures seem to contradict some of what Peter is saying, by showing that overall teen pregnancies have been dropping since 2002, with 2007 being a slight blip in the trend. (see the graph below, orange line.) His claim perhaps carries some validity if you take into account that the government wanted (but didn't reach) to halve teenage pregnancy by 2010. (from 1999 levels) An ambitious goal, but in all fairness, reducing teenage pregnancy requires concerted long term effort, and ground root social shifts. This will be a long time on going work in progress.

This has obviously been pounced on by elements of the press as concrete evidence of council estates brimming with a huge army of slaggy chavettes, popping out sproglets and being paid a million pounds in benefits, free fags and cider, and YOUR paying, do you hear middle England? In fact it only really shows that the numbers of conceptions, which are in a fairly stable declining trend since 2002, have fluctuated upwards for 2007, before regressing back to trend. But as we know statistical analysis will always take a back seat to Fleet Street sermonising about this issue. Sermonising like this.

"Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.
In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time."

I don't really need to paste much more. It's the same old straw man, slippery slope, their having abortions in assembly these days type of article that have been duly trotted out in the press, since as long as I can remember. The dogs comment is irrelevant anyway, all mammals produce the same sort of reproduction based hormones, so yeah they work pretty well across the spectrum. It seems there may be undertones that he thinks that teenage girls who get pregnant are somehow bestial and "improper". All this is beside the point of the article if we are really honest. The last two words are what it is really about.

"Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality."

I thought he directed "Howard the Duck". His opening statements are so falsifiably shoddy, and the reasoning in the rest of the article is so convoluted, I am pleased that he gets slammed in the comments to the article (and boy there can be some real mindfuckery on display there sometimes.)

"Mr. Hitchens is disingenuous when he argues that sex education in schools has failed to stop the national illegitimacy rate climbing to 46%. Classroom sex education is designed to stop childhood pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections, not to dissuade or stigmatise the many stable cohabiting adult couples whose families are presumably acceptable to Daily Mail readership in all but their lack of church and/or state approval.
As for sex education being advocated exclusively by "militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life", this could only be believed by someone who prefers manufactured simplification to reflecting on the real world. Most parents I know prefer schools to teach their offspring some of the biological basics. Sometimes this is due to haziness about some of the finer points of biology (the same reason why we are also sometimes happier about the teaching of first aid and cooking in schools). Sometimes it is sheer embarrassment. These reasons may well be deplorable on other grounds, but they are not evidence of militant leftism. A further reason, laudable from virtually all caring and responsible viewpoints, is that should parents' attempts to instill a sound sexual morality fail, they would rather deal with the emotional fallout without the added disaster of pregnancy.
Oversimplification is usually required to fuel the baser emotions of political reaction, but hopefully most readers will in this particular case have developed an immunity to it through contact with everyday life"

"This column on sex education contains so much misinformation, bias, and slanderous opinions stated as fact that I would hope that most readers would reject it, but I will comment anyway. Notice that he credits a nasty reign with dreaming up the idea and blames liberals for pushing the idea and offers only his own opinion, no references, that the programs always fail. In fact, here in Texas, we have no sex education (or actually are only allowed to teach "abstinence" if anything is taught and we have the highest teen pregnancy and highest second teen pregnancy rate in the country. This program was rammed through by people who believe Hitchen does (along with trying to get creationism into the biology books while already keeping evolution out.) States, such as Wisconsin, which have good well balanced sex education programs have much lower teen pregnancy rates (and lower abortion percentages in the population.) About the only statistic Hitchen actually offers is that the "illegitimacy rate" for one area rose from under 8% to over 40%, but he fails to define whether that applies only to teens or omits the likely fact that as time has passed an increasing number of people of all ages are living in an unmarried but permanent joining, so he may be reporting on a population 10 or 20 years ago that has now grown to adulthood (beyond teens) having children without "benefit" of marriage while those that thought "illegitimacy" was humiliating have grown beyond baby producing age and thus out of the statistics.
And like our abstinence-pushing, information-denying folk, it does not make it clear when young people who plan on holding off until marriage and then not having children immediately are going to learn that birth control is a possibility in arranging their family growth. Or is that a liberal "sin" also?"

"The annual number of teenage pregnancies in the UK has fallen by 13% since 1998, so more sex education clearly doesn’t “always” mean more teenage pregnancies.
The government has indeed failed to meet its own very ambitious target, but there has nevertheless been a significant move in the right direction.
The country with lowest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe is the Netherlands, which has plenty of sex education in its schools.
No doubt there are many reasons for the differences between the UK and the Netherlands, but sex education does not seem to be one of them.
Everyone learns about sex from a variety of sources, and a country’s attitudes to sex have many influences. Sex education in schools is just one aspect of this, and almost certainly not the most significant."

"Peter, sex education has indeed failed but not for the reasons that you state. In my view its failure can be seen in the number of men who die unnecessarily of bladder, prostate and testicular cancer because they are too embarrassed to see a doctor and so leave it to late. My brother works in a comprehensive school and recently they had to take a teenage boy to hospital; he was in agony with a strangulated testicle (caused by a sporting injury) and had done nothing for days because of embarrassment.
If sex education was working boys and girls, men and women would have no problems seeking medical help for problems "down there". I am a middle aged man who has to attend regular urology clinics and have done for 20 years. I know the frustration that staff feel when cancer is left untreatable because of late diagnosis. I believe that gynaecologists and obstetricians and constantly amazed at the ignorance of women and what has to be explained to them. Again a sign of the failure of sex education.
For those who say there should be no sex education and that it should be left to parents should look at the story of the Rev Chad Varah and why he set up the Samaritans. The main reason was that he and his clergy friends were fed up of carrying out the funerals of teenage girls who had committed suicide after menstruation; the girls wrongly thought that they had some terrible, shameful illness. The Samaritans started as a sex advice line; dealing with more general causes of suicide came much later.
So to be against sex education per se I can not agree with. Wanting it to be more about health, understanding medical issues and having a moral element I can agree with."

Now don't get me wrong. I not being flippant about teenage pregnancy. (nor do I condemn them all as sponging slags either.) Even the staunchest advocates of sexual libertarianism will agree that at the very least, 15 and 16 year old girls should go and live life for a while before faffing around with bottles and shitty nappies. Then there's the psychological burden of parenthood/pregnancy at a young age, and the disruption to studies and work that a baby brings. I have no problem with anyone highlighting these to teenagers. But that isn't what Hitchens is concerned with. (He doesn't seem concerned with evidence to back his claims up either. But what's new there?) He is hiding behind a legitimate (but smaller than many actually think) social issue, to promote his fundamentalist Christian philosophy. Attacking those who teach sex education as "educational smut" peddlers, and Marxists, is particularly objectionable. It has nothing to do with genuine concern for teenagers, and everything to do with his own evangelical baggage. We must remember that "sex education" is a broad term anyway. You could argue that teaching the Karma Sutra (I doubt very much this happens in the PSE lessons of secondary schools) is sex education, but then so is explaining the general biology of sex organs, and STD's (I'd think most 16 year old lads would flinch at what a male smear test entails.), and even womens rights. It's amazing how sex education is malleable enough a term to mean whatever a pundit wants it to mean. My own take is that in the real world, teenagers are going to get their info either from unsolicited playground gossip, pornos, or from sex education lessons by professionals. I know which I think is the best source.