TellThem! Spotlight Blog

June 21, 2007

Guest Writer Alison Piepmeier, Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston

When Our Bodies, Our Selves Became Now, What Exactly is Going on Down There?

In my Women’s and Gender Studies class last fall, I had planned a day to talk about reproductive rights. I thought we’d spend the time examining the laws and Supreme Court cases and their implications.
As the class got underway, though, it became increasingly clear to me that the students weren’t understanding certain things I was talking about. I expected that they might not know the difference between a medical abortion—the “abortion pill”—and emergency contraception—the “morning after pill.” What I didn’t expect was that most of the women in the class, although they were on birth control pills, had no idea about how oral contraceptives work. In fact, they didn’t know much about their own reproductive anatomy. We couldn’t discuss reproductive rights because these students didn’t have a basic grasp of reproduction.
I said, “Okay. Let’s back up. I’m going to tell you whatever you want to know. How detailed do you want me to be?”
“Extremely!” they said.
So I told them as much as I could. I drew a picture of ovaries and fallopian tubes and explained the female reproductive cycle. I told them how you get pregnant, and about the various contraceptives on the market and how they function. They were riveted. They kept asking questions (“How long can sperm stay alive inside a woman’s body?” Answer: up to five days if your body is producing fertile quality cervical fluid. “Can you get pregnant while you’re on your period?” Answer: it’s possible, but generally unlikely. “Is there a birth control pill for men?” Answer: there has been research done on this, but pharmaceutical companies seem to believe that there’s not much of a market for contraceptives targeting men). This conversation took up the entire class period.
These were college students, many of them having come through the South Carolina public education system. Many of them were sexually active. And they were embarrassingly poorly informed about their bodies.
I left that class feeling that I had seen the consequences of abstinence only sex education. In a recent article on the TellThem! blog (http://blog.tellthemsc.org/?p=9), William Smith, Vice President for Public Policy at SIECUS, discusses the abstinence only curriculum taught in many South Carolina schools by Heritage Community Services. This curriculum, as well as other abstinence only offerings, provides misleading information about the effectiveness of contraception, presents sexist depictions of “male sexuality” and “female sexuality” as if they are factually true, and denies students the real information they need to make informed decisions. And now a recent study funded by the federal government (http://www.siecus.org/media/press/press0141.html) has shown that these curricula don’t even work to achieve their own goals of promoting abstinence.
I have long been a supporter of comprehensive sex education. My experience in class this fall showed me that the situation is more troubling than I had suspected. Apparently there are school districts in South Carolina and elsewhere that are sending high school graduates out into the world with the level of information about their bodies I would expect from an elementary school student. They should be ashamed. The students deserve better.
Guest Writer Alison Piepmeier is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, where she is also an assistant professor of English. She is the author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America and co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. She and her partner write about politics, culture, and life in general on their blog, Baxter Sez (piepmeier.blogspot.com).