Abstinence-only curriculum is not sex education, judge rules

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California’s sex-education law prohibits school districts from indoctrinating students on the need to remain celibate before marriage or teaching them that abstinence is the only safe way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, a judge has ruled.

The decision by Fresno County Superior Court Judge Donald Black applies only to the 40,000-student Clovis Unified School District. But as the first ruling to interpret California’s 11-year-old law on sex education and disease prevention, it should put schools on notice that “young people need complete, accurate health information required by law,” said Phyllida Burlingame, director of Reproductive Justice Policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, which took part in the suit.

“This is the first time that abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula have been found to be medically inaccurate,” Burlingame said Monday.

The state law requires school districts to make their sex-education programs “age-appropriate” and directs them to teach students, starting in the seventh grade, that abstinence from sex is the only sure way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But it also requires districts to provide “medically accurate information” on other methods, including all contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The law also requires public schools to teach students, in middle school and again in high school, about the dangers of HIV and AIDS and how they can be prevented.

A group of parents in Clovis filed suit in November 2012, saying the school district was using texts and videos that focused on abstinence and made little or no mention of contraceptives or claimed they were ineffective. One video, described in Black’s ruling, compared a woman who was not a virgin to a dirty shoe. Other videos “perpetuated sexual orientation bias,” the judge said, including one that encouraged students to adopt the mantra, “One man, one woman, one life.”

The parents dismissed their suit in February 2014 after the district changed its policies. But Black, in a ruling issued April 28, ordered the district to pay attorneys’ fees to the parents’ lawyers, saying the suit had been the catalyst that led Clovis to bring its ninth-grade courses into compliance with the law.

“Access to medically and socially appropriate sexual education is an important public right,” Black said.

Burlingame, of the ACLU, said objections from students and parents have prompted other California school districts to scale back their abstinence-only policies, including Fremont in 2008.

But she cited a 2011 study at UC San Francisco that found uneven compliance with the state law: In a sampling of California school districts, more than 40 percent failed to teach about condoms and other contraceptive methods in middle school; and in high school, 16 percent of students were taught that condoms were ineffective, and 70 percent of districts failed to comply with provisions of the law that require age-appropriate materials about sexual orientation.