"Rise in teenage pregnancy rate spurs new debate"

The epigraph to this rededicated blog has been changed. It is now a quote from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis:

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."

"Rise in teenage pregnancy rate spurs new debate on arresting it," an article from today's The Washington Post, plays off Lewis's sentiment about chastity and abstinence in ways that the greatest explainer of Christian belief of the 20th century could not have anticipated. Lewis died in 1963 before the "sexual revolution" had entrenched itself in the culture. Mere Christianity was the outgrowth of BBC radio talks made between 1941 and 1944, while Lewis, a Britisher, was an academic at Oxford during World War II.

Now, less than half a century later,

The abortion rate among teenagers rose 1 percent in 2006 from the previous year — to 19.3 abortions per 1,000 women in that age group, the analysis [of the most recent data collected by the federal government and the nation's leading reproductive-health think tank] found. Taking that and miscarriages into account, the analysis showed that the pregnancy rate among U.S. women younger than 20 in 2006 was 71.5 per 1,000 women, a 3 percent increase from the rate of 69.5 in 2005. That translated into 743,000 pregnancies among teenagers, or about 7 percent of women in this age group.

has become a news item to be consumed with the morning cereal. In Lewis's time there was not such frank talk about adults', much less teenagers', sex lives.

In the year Lewis died, 1963, although teen pregnancies and teen births were already high in the U.S. by the historical standards of the time, the culture had not yet begun to rely heavily on sex education in the public schools to rein in teen sexual expression. I was a (male) teenager of 16 in that year. The persons we now speak of as "women under age 20" were, at the time, still "girls." The rule was, "Nice girls don't."

In those now seemingly halcyon days, I never had a "sex ed" course, though I believe girls were getting some preliminary form of it in junior high school gym classes under the topic of "hygiene." I wound up in private school by 9th grade, so maybe I just missed it.

Today, those who say sex-ed courses should teach the use of condoms and other birth control methods duke it out with those who want an "abstinence only" curriculum.

I would recommend "chastity only," not "abstinence only." Abstinence per se is not a virtue; chastity is. Abstinence is a negative; chastity is a positive.

The purpose of a public school education is to instill in children the virtues they need to possess if they are going to be good citizens. Not just some of the virtues, all of them. And chastity is one of them.

C.S. Lewis continued, in his essay on chastity:

I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

I think Lewis (pictured at right) was right about one thing here, but wrong about another. He was right to suggest that the Diabolical self can turn us into self-righteous prigs, or as Jesus put it in one of the Gospels, Matthew 23:27, into "whitewashed tombs ... full of dead men's bones and everything unclean." In other words, the worst kind of hypocrites.

But Lewis was wrong to suggest that "the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred" are in a different category than the pleasures of the flesh. We have seen, in the years since Lewis wrote, the opening up of the culture to unfettered sexuality. We have also seen a huge rise in all of the ostensibly non-sexual offenses Lewis mentions above.

Think about Internet "flame wars." Think about vitriolic talk radio. Think about all the current furor over the "culture of power in Washington D.C." Think about the naked hatred that seems to be fueling much of our politics today. They suggest that maybe, just maybe, a lack of sexual chastity in the culture morphs inevitably into a lack of chastity in general.

In fact, I think that is exactly what recent history proves. If I'm right, then we all need to reclaim the notion that chastity, sexual and otherwise, lies at the very core of Judeo-Christian belief and practice.

If the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam teach the fundamental sanctity of nuptial sex — and all do — then we need to listen to them again. We need to bring their conceptions of virtue back into currency in the "public square." We need to make them once again the foundation-stones of our civic virtue.


* * *


Since the above was posted, Study: Abstinence sex-ed works appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. A scientific study published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine has shown that abstinence-only sex education programs for sixth and seventh graders can result in fewer children becoming sexually active in the ensuing two years.

As a Catholic, I see that as the cup being half full. On the one hand, it counters the assertions that have recently held sway to the effect that abstinence education is a big flop. On the other hand, it apparently says nothing about abstinence-only programs that "take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions [under study] encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms.

Would "moralistic" abstinence programs that advocate delaying sex until marriage, not having sex outside marriage at all, and not using artificial means of birth control fare as well? Or perhaps even better? Those important questions are beyond the scope of the study ...