Relationships and Sex Education: an alternative view

Relationships and Sex Education: an alternative view

 

Louise Kirk highlights important developments in education policy

 

 

The task of creating a true Catholic RSE programme is massive. We aren’t just talking about getting the best out of new regulations. We are talking about reversing decades of damage in which Catholic schools have been led by the secular agenda instead of vice versa. Promotion of the LGBT agenda is one thing, but it is still small fry compared to the big problem, that of ordinary young people who should be setting up the married families of the future but who are failing to do so in large numbers. We are talking about the backbone of Britain becoming crumbly.

 

Right back in the 1980s Christine Vollmer, creator of the Alive to the World programme of which I am UK Co-ordinator, set up a prolife organisation among the poorest of the poor in the shanty towns of Caracas. She was puzzling over how one could prevent the lovely young girls from becoming teenage unmarried mothers. And then she noticed something. These girls had every bit as much desire for romance and marriage and family life as richer children, and the boys just as much yearning for heroism. What both sexes lacked were the values and direction to take them to their goals – their own families were chaotic, and the Christian moral framework had largely broken down round them. Interestingly, a report by the Centre for Social Justice published last year showed similar findings in this country. Some 78% of 14-17 year-olds thought finding a lasting adult relationship not only important, but more important than a career. A similar number (8 out of 10) wanted to get married at some point. And yet a few years later, as Sir Paul Coleridge of the Marriage Foundation has pointed out, this desire for marriage has a way of dwindling.

 

 

Here surely is our overall goal for RSE: not just teaching children to abstain from sex for a time but giving them the values and strength of character to remain chaste in preparation for a lasting marriage. Eligible young men and women are ones who are generous and self-controlled in spirit, who work hard and make use of their talents, present themselves well and get on with others, and, in general, are givers to the community and fun to be around. You will notice that those most eligible to found future families are also desirable in the workplace and in any other vocation they may have: as a priest, or nun, or single person. They are the good citizens that any country should prize.

 

 

How do we achieve this education?

 

I would suggest by hijacking school sex education with a specific target in mind: destroying the hold of contraception. Most revolutions rest on ideas. The sexual revolution is unusual in that its ideology depends on a material instrument. Remove it, and all sorts of things start to fall back into place. Imagine a world without contraception. Girls would no longer agree to easy sex with boys, recovering their roles as the natural door-keepers of intimacy. Boys would be encouraged to ask their girlfriends to marry them, much earlier than at present. Both would recover their sense of modesty, and the natural interplay between boy and girl, man and woman, which is at the heart of romance and true love. When Sir Paul Coleridge gave the Lords & Commons Family & Child Protection Group a presentation on his ideas for marriage reform, he showed us that divorce and family breakdown followed on historically from introduction of the Pill. He also told us that, from the 1600s until the end of the 1970s, unmarried co-habitation never accounted for more than 5% of couples in any strata of society. Now 87% of higher earners (over £43,000) still marry but only 24% of low earners (under £16,000). Given the benefits of marriage, economically as well as against every other marker, this is widening inequalities in a disastrous way.

 

 

We are able to contemplate such action because of massive strides in understanding natural fertility. Fertility Awareness-Based Methods (FABM) of spacing births follow ecological trends and are now as effective as the Pill at avoiding pregnancy. What is more, teaching children to understand their own fertility promotes chastity and self-respect and prepares young people for fulfilling sexual lives in lasting marriages. Everybody likes to learn about themselves, and the truths of the human body, the psyche, and the differences between men and women, are fascinating. They are also relevant to teenagers in the here and now. Opening these to young people makes sense of our Judaeo-Christian morality and of St John Paul’s Theology of the Body.

 

 

Science can thus be shown to support the Catholic Church’s teaching on the inviolability of the sexual act, and it’s not only Catholics who are saying this. If you go to a World Congress of Families you will find delegates from every faith, mostly Christian, coming in behind similar pastoral policies and thanking the Catholic Church for giving a lead. Modern methods of natural fertility management not only give couples a reliable tool to help them plan or avoid conception. They have also been found to heal and preserve happy marriages: the divorce rate is something like 5%. It’s a glorious irony that NFP has done what the Pill was touted to do: promote fulfilling sexual lives.

 

The vehicle created by sex education gives us an outreach into every home in the land. Taking it over and replacing contraception with teaching natural fertility is of course fraught with difficulty. At the time of Humanae Vitae the controversy

revolved around one form of family planning over another. Now we would be taking on the commercial interests bound up in the contraceptive industry, together with the ways of life to which it has given rise: the various LGBT varieties and also having women give priority to careers over having children. Earlier this year the New York Times carried a fullpage ad in which 180 US companies claimed that access to abortion is necessary to keep their workforce functioning.

 

 

So is such a scheme possible? Not only is it possible. Eventually it will happen regardless of what we do or don’t do, because no society lives forever according to a lie. We can also believe with Cardinal Trujillo, the formidable President of the Pontifical Council for the Family in St John Paul’s time, that learning the truth of our human sexual biology has its own resonance and ability to convert. If we allow ourselves to be God’s instruments, he will lead the enterprise which will no doubt take decades to accomplish. There are already factors pointing in our favour. For a start, the Pill is fifty years old, its drawbacks are increasingly aired and its ethos is out of kilter with today’s environmental sensibilities. What’s more, despite the money thrown at new solutions, none have been found. The human body and psyche were not designed for contraception, and the search for “the perfect method” will only ever be filled with mirages. Contraception would still be taught, of course – it has to be – but truthful facts would reveal it as a blunt instrument past its sell-by date.