Poll: Most OK Birth Control for Schools
WASHINGTON - People decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed.
Sixty-seven percent support giving contraceptives to students, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many - 62 percent - said they believe providing birth control reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.
“Kids are kids,” said Danielle Kessenger, 39, a mother of three young children from Jacksonville, Fla., who supports providing contraceptives to those who request them. “I was a teenager once and parents don’t know everything, though we think we do.”
Yet most who support schools distributing contraceptives prefer that they go to children whose parents have consented. People are also closely divided over whether sex education and birth control are more effective than stressing morality and abstinence, and whether giving contraceptives to teenagers encourages them to have sexual intercourse.
“It’s not the school’s place to be parents,” said Robert Shaw, 53, a telecommunications company manager from Duncanville, Texas. “For a school to provide birth control, it’s almost like the school saying, ‘You should go out and have sex.’”
Those surveyed were not asked to distinguish between giving contraceptives to boys or girls.
The survey was conducted in late October after a school board in Portland, Maine, voted to let a middle school health center provide students with full contraceptive services. The school’s students are sixth- through eighth-graders, when most children are 11 to 13 years old, and do not have to tell their parents about services they receive.
Portland school officials plan to consider a proposal soon that would let parents forbid their children from receiving prescription contraceptives like birth control pills.
Teenage pregnancy rates have declined to about 75 per 1,000, down from a 1990 peak of 117, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research center. Still, nearly half of teens aged 15 to 19 report having had sex at least once, and almost 750,000 of them a year become pregnant.
The 67 percent in the AP poll who favor providing birth control to students include 37 percent who would limit it to those whose parents have consented, and 30 percent to all who ask.
Minorities, older and lower-earning people were likeliest to prefer requiring parental consent, while those favoring no restriction tended to be younger and from cities or suburbs. People who wanted schools to provide no birth control at all were likelier to be white and higher-income earners.
“Parents should be in on it,” said Jennifer Johnson, 29, of Excel, Ala., a homemaker and mother of a school-age child. “Birth control is not saying you can have sex, it’s protecting them if they decide to.”
About 1,300 U.S. public schools with adolescent students - less than 2 percent of the total - have health centers staffed by a doctor or nurse practitioner who can write prescriptions, said spokeswoman Divya Mohan of the National Assembly of School-Based Health Care. About one in four of those provide condoms, other contraceptives, prescriptions or referrals, Mohan said.
Less than 1 percent of middle schools and nearly 5 percent of high schools make condoms available for students, said Nancy Brener, a health scientist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Underlining the schisms over the issue, those saying sex education and birth control were better for reducing teen pregnancies outnumber people preferring morality and abstinence by a slim 51 percent to 46 percent.
Younger people were likelier to consider sex education and birth control the better way to limit teenage pregnancies, as were 64 percent of minorities and 47 percent of whites. Nearly seven in 10 white evangelicals opted for abstinence, along with about half of Catholics and Protestants.
In addition, 49 percent say providing teens with birth control would not encourage sexual intercourse and a virtually identical 46 percent said it would.
Though men and women have similar views about whether to provide contraceptives to students, women are likelier than men to think it will not encourage sexual intercourse, 55 percent to 43 percent.
Asked when young people should first be allowed to get birth control, ages 16 and 18 drew the most responses, while only a third chose age 15 or younger. Women’s selections averaged just over age 16, slightly higher than men, while young people and Westerners preferred younger ages than others.
“I’d be pulling my kids out of that school,” Ron Wrobel, 55, an engineer from Port Huron, Mich., said of the Maine middle school. He said birth control should be for teens at least 17 years old.
Mirroring the rift that has played out in countless battles in Congress, Democrats were likelier than Republicans to favor freer access to birth control and to have more faith that it reduces teenage pregnancies. Forty-five percent of Republicans - including 51 percent of GOP women - say birth control should not be provided to any students, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.
The poll involved telephone interviews with 1,004 adults from Oct. 23-25. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
AP Director of Surveys Trevor Tompson and AP News survey specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
© 2007 The Associated Press
simply brutal.
children are children except for the entertainment industry that intoxicates and kills their innocence as preparing them to be tabu sexual objects for corrupt pedophiles embbeded in all corners of our society.
Beginning with our schools churches and definitely senate.
And what’s your favorite Bible quotation?
no need to open the bible to protect the innocence of children
What are educational institutions for? What is that they are imparting to the students? Isn’t it because the purpose of educational institutions is so “perverted” that the standard of education is so pathetic in America????????
“It’s not the school’s place to be parents,” said Robert Shaw, 53, a telecommunications company manager from Duncanville, Texas. “For a school to provide birth control it’s almost like the school saying, ‘You should go out and have sex.’”
I am really really sick of people pretending that Teens needs something to make them want to have sex.
Let’s get one thing straight. We were all teens at one time.
WE DIDNT NEED ANYTHING TO MAKE US WANT TO HAVE SEX.
When I was a teen all I thought about were cars, boobs, and food.
Come on. Anyone, not just teens, that wants to have sex can and will. Birth control doesn’t all of a sudden make a normal kid suddenly get the urge to do the nasty.
What it does is protects them WHEN they do.
Grow up people. Please. Stop acting like you were not 15 once.
Please stop acting like you have forgotten about the illegal, dangerous, and sometimes deadly abortions that parents forced their kids to have back in the day.
Let’s put an end to the ignorant ideals of the prudes and protect our kids.
Let you kids know that sex is about as normal as eating. Open up to them in a real way so they know that, they don’t have to sneak and hide.
This will prevent lingering STD’s and unintended pregnancies.
Lets be real people.
~Future~
If there is one place where condoms and other contraceptives are needed, it should be the WHITE HOUSE. It is really surprising that the government hasn’t come up with a policy of “free supply of condoms” after Bill Clinton’s saga!!! Poor Clinton, he had to use his cigars….
Yes, I forgot. Even the US senators should be provided with free condoms. This is very much needed for those senators, who get an “incling” whenever they see SECURITY MEN. Oh! yes! security personnel need them for their protection!!!!!!!!
Access to birth control is a good thing. Teens who are going to have sex, are going to have it. It is in everyone’s interest that they do it with protection. This usually means a condom. Not exactly environmentally friendly but at least it doesn’t alter the women’s hormone levels and who knows what of the effluents from the girls’ waste. I thought the pill was all sunshine and lollipops and it cleared up skin, reduced chance of pregnancy, and was easy to take. But it screws with your body, is unnatural, and has negative environmental effects. Due to hormones in the meat we eat girls are likely maturing earlier and earlier. Imagine what will happen to a girl who matures at 11 and starts taking the Pill shortly after, and into her adult life. After going off of it I feel much, much better and I was only on for a few years. It’s something they don’t tell girls when pushing the pill to the teen girl populous.
There is always a better way.
Screw morality and religious reasons - giving any drug to a minor without parental consent is not right. Parents are responsible for the welfare AND the actions of minors, we should be kept in the loop about anything our schools give our kids.
The public education system is not the panacea of everything good that it’s been painted to be. Lots of good things come from school, but also many harmful things. We must be kept in the loop as to what’s happening to our kids.
“…sexual objects for corrupt pedophiles embbeded in all corners of our society.”
Please…that’s just ’silly’ (and out-of-place).
So, too, the lack of distinction, above, between prescription/drug-based contraceptives and the “over-counter” variety. Schools are indeed and appropriately vested with some ‘parental-rights’ (as “loco parentis”, if nothing-else), but in no-way are schools in a position or capable-of acting as a doctor. Hormone-based contraception MUST be administered and supervised by a medical-professional (if at-all) — an argument in favor of a child’s right to choose/seek private medical care (another argument in favor of single-payer/’provided’ medical services for all-citizens).
I could care-less if condoms were distributed by schools, or machines in bank-lobbies, or by dispensers in public-transportation — the only harm from that would be to those few with Latex-allergies. So, ‘Yes’, let any school distribute-such (and raise the pay of janitorial-staff — who will be cleaning-up after the inevitable ‘water-balloon fights’).
However, the real (and obligatory) role for schools is to provide basic and factual sex/health-education. If parents should happen to object to this, then (with due-apologies and some-sympathy) ‘parent’s be damned’. One can be actually-suspect of any parent objecting to their child, at any-age, learning about their own-body and it’s functions/nature [some of these objecting-parents, in fact, might best be referred to proper-authorities for investigation of ‘true-motive’ and/or their continued sole-access regards the supervision/care/treatment of their children].
It isn’t any school’s ‘place’ to advocate overt sexual-behaviors, imo — but it is absolutely their required-Role in Society to provide at least a base-level knowledge and understanding of sexuality. Whether or not they hand out condoms is Secondary (no pun intended…).
we were born to have sex, and if we cant have it while we are young and sexy, then what is the point? stupid bible thumpers, grow up!
well i have to do a debate on rather birth control shoulh be distributed in high schools and i totally agree. it’s not promoting sex it’s just telling them that if they’re gonna do it(which most of them are) just protect yourself and others