Quick Fix and More

LAST MONTH THE NATIONAL ACADEMY of Sciences (NAS) issued a report that called for increased sex education and endorsed the use of condoms. Last week a commission at the Academy chaired by Daniel D. Federman '49, dean for students and alumni at Harvard Medical School, released a two-year study again calling for "aggressive public education" on sexuality and the free or low-cost distribution of contraceptives. The first report concerns AIDS, the second, adolescent pregnancy.

The studies were unrelated, but the conclusions are nearly identical. And the parallel is not a mere coincidence in this era of sexually transmitted diseases and one million adolescent pregnancies a year. The message coming from all sides is clear: stigma and ignorance about sexuality have crippled government response to the most urgent social and health problems facing the country.

The federal government should be the first audience for the report. The conclusions announced last week by the working arm of the NAS--the Congressionally chartered National Research Council--are a welcome dissenting voice from a government that has failed to respond adequately to the AIDS epidemic and to an equally alarming epidemic of teen pregnancy. As an author of the AIDS study commented, there is "very little knowledge about sexual practices in the U.S. at all."

Education about sexual behavior among those at risk for AIDS works. A precipitous fall--on the order of 75 percent--in the rate of venereal infection among homosexual men in some urban areas has shown the efficacy of education for behavioral change. Examples like that bode well for an education effort to address the fact that teenage girls in the U.S. are five times more likely to get pregnant than those in other countries, and that 60 percent of Black children are born out of wedlock. Studies of programs in schools show that neither distributing contraceptives nor educating teens about sex is effective on its own. But the combination works. That is one reason why the Academy's call for both rings true.

Teen pregnancy among Blacks has been called one of this country's fundamental social crises. The Academy called AIDS "a national health crisis." The coincidence of the reports' conclusions points to an underlying problem: too often government and public alike have sidestepped education and open discussion about sexuality. Clearly contraception is a quick fix rather than a long-term solution for problems like the breakdown of the family and the spread of an incurable disease. But for the moment, a quick fix is just what is needed. We hope the recent reports become more than mere recommendations.