I recall with great clarity in a sex ed segment of health class in Grade 8 our teacher asked, “If you or your girlfriend had to get an abortion, would you keep it a secret or tell someone close to you?”

“Had to” get an abortion? Was the most pressing dilemma for a student in the class whether to share this “secret”, in this hypothetical and theoretical scenario?
Why not discuss whether abortion is/was a wise choice? How did we get to the topic of abortion, before even discussing how to prevent getting in that situation in the first place?
Even at age 14 I realized how politicized and ideologically-driven sex education could become. That was 1986.
    Identity politics, political correctness, secular liberalism and the sexing up of our culture has been ramped up over the past quarter century, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty may have thought that his “new” public school sex ed classes could be some kind of educational bulwark.
Recently he said he wanted to bring in sex education beginning at Grade 3, with rudimentary instruction, and have various sexual acts discussed in more and more details over the course of the next couple of grades or so.
    As a result of the public’s dispute, he backtracked on his plan days later.
    It’s re-opened up the controversial can of worms for proponents, and opponents, of public school sex education, and the question of: just how far is too far?
The State feels that due to the sexually charged environment we all live in, parents evidently are too dumb, skittish, irresponsible, incapable or unwilling to step up to the plate and educate their own children.
Though we know forty and fifty years ago there was no such thing as sex-ed, and, virtually no unwed moms nor STD epidemic, it was also a different world.
How different? We are constantly assailed by a barrage of obsenity.
Today, pornography is a twelve billion-dollar industry. The average age of the first Internet exposure to porn is 11. The largest consumers of Internet porn are 12-17 year olds. This decade brought us Shot at Love, Girls Gone Wild, Bratz and subway ads for breast enlargements. Every issue of mom’s Cosmopolitan contains tips on orgasms.
We know that it’s extraordinarily difficult to ghettoize modern children from ubiquitous sexual imagery – not to mention peer pressure.
The facts are these: By Grade 9, one third of Canadian teenagers are having oral sex, according to ParentCentral.ca and the Toronto Star. In the past decade 15-19 year olds who are having sex stayed roughly the same, averaging about 45 per cent.
Even though the number of teenage mommies in Canada has dropped about 2 to 4 per cent a year since 1976, there are still about 31,000 of them each year.
But there’s a fuller story that needs telling. As StatsCan reports, the number of abortions has spiked about 5 to 7 per cent more a year for the past fifteen years.
That’s still classified as “teenage pregnancies” – and means all of the high school bathroom condom machines make for nothing more than nice wall decorations.
The number of AIDS cases remained generally unchanged from 1998 to 2007, and positive HIV test reports climb slightly each year.
These statistics can either justify the State swooping in to “inoculate” our kids, or have us think twice about letting youngsters have State sex education.
Parents want their children prepared, so the real argument is a matter of whether the state, the home, or both, should do the teaching.
The problem with government control is that parents might abdicate responsibility, thus wiping their hands of any frank discussions on the topic with their children.  
The big fear from the “pro sex ed” side is that kids will inevitably learn sex myths from the playground, the Internet, television and anywhere else, whereas a proper educational setting can, the theory goes, set the record straight.
There’s no shortage of those relying on anecdotal evidence to back up their preference for school sex education. For example, folks who as kids thought that kissing made babies. To me, that’s like saying: Sonny Bono died skiing so it’s up to the State to instruct you on how to ski.
With State education, there are going to be kids who’ll snooze through class, barely make the passing grade, or study for the exam to forget it all the next day. Then what?
    To be fair, it’s a crapshoot whether parents – if left to be the sole educator on the matter - will do an equally lousy job.
Still, this should not obscure the real challenge at hand: who, and how, should teach our kids sex?
Those who subscribe to the Trudeaupian view that the government has no place in the bedroom are often the ones, ironically, who are for sex education – which means that they are for the government’s place in the bedrooms of the future.
Proponents of sex education say that since kids will play with fire anyway, it’s better to learn how to play with fire safely. Those who would prefer sex education to be taught later, or not at all, say that exposing kids to the how-tos when they’re not mature enough might mean they’ll act on it far earlier, far less responsibly, than they should.
It’s worth looking at major studies that have been undertaken to find if sex education encourages sexual behaviour.
The American Journal of Public Health showed that condom education in San Francisco schools resulted in only eight per cent of boys, and two per cent of girls using condoms each time they had sex. Maybe that’s better than zero.
But Planned Parenthood – the polar opposite of religious Luddites - did their own study, concluding that those teens who received sex education had the highest rates of sexual activity. The US Congress did its own study in the 80s, and found the same thing.
At one high school in San Marcos, California, out of 600 girls, the number of teen pregnancies dropped from 147 to 20 pregnancies within two years of instituting “Teen Aid” – a federally funded program which emphasizes saving sex until marriage.
It pays to examine divergent geographical regions for sexual activity, too. Most telling, are US statistics, between disparate states.
In Utah, the most conservative state in America, the number of AIDS cases were 2,500 in 2009. The number of teens with AIDS was two. According to the Census Bureau, in 2009 Utah ranked 48th in chlamydia and 46th in gonorrhea among the states. Utah also ranks third from bottom in unmarried teen pregnancy, just above Idaho and Wyoming. (Population, 2.8 million)
In contrast, in New York, one fourth of the population has genital herpes, while syphilis numbers keep increasing annually since 2000. More than 150,000 New Yorkers have AIDS. About 20,000 people have gonorrhea. About 40,000 New York teens will get pregnant this year – about the same number of Canada’s. (Population, 8.3 million)
    My guess is that in culturally unique Utah, parents as well as community and religion play a role in the upbringing of children.
We don’t have Utah in Ontario. Neither do we have New York City in Ontario.
    So what’s the answer for Ontario, when certain items in sex education could offend religious sensibilities, cross boundaries for certain parents, or possibly transmit mature subject matter to children before they’re ready to handle it?
     For a change, give parents a choice. As soon as the state imposes their values – and make no mistake, the contents of sex education is always a values judgment – feathers will be ruffled. Every parent should be able to determine what’s right for their child. One size fits all is not the answer.
Why can’t sex ed be an elective course? Parents should have the option of placing their child in an alternative study class during sex education. It’s an experiment worth trying. If a whole generation of children grow up to be promiscuous, teenage moms or riddled with STDs, “Daddy Premier” can step in and change the rules – and shame on anyone, and their consciences, who emphatically protested sex education in schools.
If the statistics go down, we’ve found the magic bullet.
If the statistics stay roughly the same, at the very least then, we’ve given parents the right to have some say in how their children are educated in delicate matters such as these.