An incredible sex education and pro-contraception propaganda crusade is sweeping North America and Great Britain as the result of the AIDS epidemic.

In the United States, the Congress-chartered National Research Council has called for free condoms wherever “teenage boys congregate.”  It claims there’s “little evidence” for the “view” that contraceptives promote “early sexual activity.”  The panel of “experts” believe “that the strategy for reducing early pregnancy must be the encouragement of diligent contraceptive use by all sexually active teenagers.”  For young women, the panel said in its October 1986 report, the best contraceptives are birth control pills.

These and other proposals were widely reported in Canada in such articles as “Birth control ads on TV urged by MDs in U.S.”  (Globe, September 5, 1986); “Sex-ed, contraception keys to prevent teenage pregnancies” (Moncton Times-Transcript, December 10, 1986); “Condom ads to fight AIDS may soon be on TV” (Toronto Star, November 13, 1986); and “Explicit AIDS information urged as early as Grade 7 (Toronto Star, January 6, 1987). One illustration of the condom crusade was Montreal’s Santa Claus distributing 5,000 condoms at homosexual bars during the 1986 Christmas season.

The Pill

The Condom crusade is part of the regular ongoing pro-contraceptive campaign which in 1986 seemed to centre on defending the safety of the birth control pill. The media and the pharmaceutical industry continued to do what they have done in the past, that is, mislead readers and consumers with half-truths.

“Study finds no link between pill use and breast cancer,” said a Toronto Star article (November 9, 1985). “Good news about birth control pills” read McLean’s headline for its “Health” page on September 22, 1986, announcing the latest study of breast cancer. Only careful reading led the McLean’s reader to the discovery, toward the end of the article, that for teenagers “the widespread use of oral contraceptives is such a recent social phenomenon that the effects of extreme long-term use will not be known for another 10 years.”  The article also ignored some 56 known adverse side effects of oral contraceptives as listed in the Canadian Medical Association Journal of September 1, 1985. It concluded by quoting Dr. Marion Powell, director of Toronto’s Bay Centre for Birth Control (who, at the time, was preparing a pro-abortion report for the Liberal-NDP government of Ontario): “The pill is the best and most effective method of contraception for young, healthy women.”

(Note that the Bay Centre for Birth Control was established by Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital in 1963 to dispense birth control information when it was still illegal under Canadian law. Thus, it played a role in the spread of contraceptives parallel to today’s promotion of abortion on demand by Morgentaler’s clinics.)

As for the pharmaceutical companies, they reap enormous profits producing dangerous chemical and mechanical devices, but most of their expenses are covered by taxpayers’ money used for grants towards contraceptive research. According to Family Planning Perspectives, a journal of the leading promoter of the contraceptive mentality, Planned Parenthood of America, the United States spends the most – an average of $127 million annually. It is followed by Britain ($4.8 million), Canada and the Netherlands ($4.2 million each) and Sweden ($3.2 million). (Averaged over the years 1977 through 1983). The total over four years, 1980 through 1983, a staggering $617 million, 80 per cent of it from the United States.

Much of the Pill’s defence in 1986 seemed to come from the regular medical health contributors whose columns appear in both Canada and the United States. The headlines tell the story: “Pill still good risk,” (Dr. Lamb explains), February 6, 1986; “Fear of using pill unfounded,” (Lamb), June 19, 1986; “Tubal ligation has the lowest complication rate,” (Dr. Howard Seiden, Medicine), August 29, 1986; “Pondering pros and perils of the pill,” (The Doctor Game, W. Gifford Jones), September 12, 1986; “The pill is part of today’s lifestyle,” (Dr. Lamb explains), September 26, 1986; and so on. And, of course, there is Ann Landers: “Get contraceptives before you become sexually active,” (December 31, 1986).

Sex clinics in schools

But the greatest pressure today favours wide-spread use of the condom, this as a direct result of the AIDS epidemic (with diagnosed cases doubling every 12 months in Canada). It is closely associated with new proposals to invade the schools and promote contraception, beginning with the upper levels of the elementary system.

Throughout the USA, health officials and the supporters of Planned Parenthood have begun a push to put “sex clinics” in every junior and senior high school in the nation by 1991. As Judie Brown, director of the American Life League (ALL) pointed out, absolute moral values are disregarded as the clinics teach youngsters that the “only thing necessary is to be protected when they have sex outside of marriage.” (Wanderer, October 30, 1986).

The clinics are an implementation of one of the goals of Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher, the late co-founder (with Margaret Sanger) of Planned Parenthood. PP’s aim, Judie Brown noted, is “compulsory birth control for the young to help achieve what Guttmacher called ‘the perfect contraceptive society.”  “The childless couple is for them the ideal,” she said. Meanwhile, they don’t tell the teenagers about the dangers of contraceptives, Brown noted; they keep denying the fact that promoting contraceptives leads to increased teenage sexual activity; and they exaggerate the 1.1 million U.S. teenage pregnancies into a “crisis” by not pointing out that “this number includes 675,000 married females aged 18 to 19.”

State in the bedroom

There are three other aspects to the school clinic idea. First, many people recognize school-based “clinics” which dispense sexual information and contraceptives as a new violation of the rights of the parents. Instead of the family, the state becomes the sex educator of the children. The school clinic is seen as its handy instrument. Some people fall for the argument on the grounds that supposedly many parents don’t tell their children anything. What they mean is that they disapprove of those parents who do not initiate their children in the use of contraceptives. Hence, they will so it for them.

Canadians who remember the sixties will recall how the legalization of contraceptives, divorce and abortion was accomplished by Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals with the slogan, the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. In fact, at that time the state never had a place there. But, today, the state forces all taxpayers to contribute to its anti-life, anti-family policies of legalized abortion, contraception and sterilization, while leaving society in general to pick up the consequences – whether moral, social or financial – of ever-increasing breakdowns and new assaults on family life.

A second aspect of school-based clinics is their relationship to increased abortions. A recent study by researchers Stan Weed and Joseph Olson has – as other studies did earlier – found that although the high use of school clinics is related to a lower teen birthrate, the latter was not due to a decrease in teenage pregnancy, but the result of an increase in abortions (Michael Schwartz, “Birth Control rackets are Real Abortions”). Naturally, the school’s “health clinic” will refer individual students to abortionists when it becomes clear that its contraceptive programme has failed. In other words, Planned Parenthood of America benefits in two ways: millions of dollars in federal grants for school clinics and millions more from the proceeds of its many abortion clinics. (Planned Parenthood of America operates at least 50 abortuaries in the U.S.)

Condoms on TV

The third aspect is the projected blitz on television. Planned Parenthood of America is running expensive full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and other mass circulation newspapers demanding condom advertisements on TV, plus free public service plugs on the three big networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, ads and plugs which are banned at the moment. The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour aired the idea of such ads once again around Christmas time, 1986. The American Academy of Pediatrics urged such advertising in September, 1986, followed by Ann Landers, “Dear Abby” and Washington Post columnist Ellen Goodman (December 5). In a recent Cagney & Lacey (of pro-abortion fame) show, Lacey recommended condoms in her “little talk” about “safe sex” to her 16-year-old son as he went out on a date.

Making it mandatory

If access to contraception in the schools is not accepted voluntarily, then it will be made mandatory. The American Civil Liberties Union, legal handmaiden for Planned Parenthood, is already suing the New York RC Archdiocese, which will halt Foster Care programmes helping thousands of children rather than comply with court-ordered contraceptive/abortion programmes. RC Cardinal O’Conner, with Jewish orthodox Rabbis as allies, opposes school sex clinics as well. Meanwhile Episcopal (Anglican) Rev. Ms. Bea Blair (formerly head of Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights) heads the supporters, demanding that all schools be compelled to have them.

The same kind of threat of coercion was implied earlier, in the fall of 1985, when the National Organization of Women (NOW) and its Legal Defence and Education Fund filed complaints against CBS and ABC with the Federal Communications Commission for refusing to accept their ad promoting contraceptives as a “public service” as (All News, October 11, 1985).

Great Britain

The AIDS explosion is also pressuring the British. In November 1986 the British government announced a spending programme of $20 million on nationwide advertising. The message to the public will be, “Stick to one partner – if that is not possible, make sure a condom is used.”  In addition to a leaflet blitz where every household in the British Isles received a leaflet in the mail, the government announced it would use TV.

Mrs. Thatcher’s proposed campaign will not focus on the real problems any more than do the others. There will be no determination to end permissive attitudes to homosexual activity or casual sex. There will be no closing of bath-houses or other gathering places, or banning literature promoting the same. The solution hinges on an appeal to people to use a condom while continuing to turn a blind eye on sexual license. But anal sex and oral sex – besides being perversions – are not safe even with condoms. Loose-living people nay well exercise greater care because of fear. Apparently they are doing this already. But public advertising for condoms will worsen the problem again, not least by creating a false sense of security.

Canada

In Canada, too, some are promoting the same policies as Planned Parenthood in the United States. The Ontario Public Education Panel on AIDS, a government advisory body, is looking for materials to use in schools starting with Grade 7. Sex education of the Planned Parenthood variety is also the solution of Toronto’s medical officer of health, Dr. “Sandy” Macpherson (Toronto Star, January 7, 1987). Bill Mindell, of Toronto’s department of public health and a member of the provincial AIDS Panel, thinks there should be a specific curriculum for each grade in the schools (Toronto Star, November 29, 1986). The health officials, of course, are pushing the use of condoms.

Dr. Catherine Hankins of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS also does not think that Canada is doing enough. Children should be given comprehensive sexual education starting at the age of eight or nine, Dr. Hankins says. And she wants condom-dispensing machines in all junior and senior high schools and in all public washrooms (Globe, November 17, 1986).

A similar proposal to install vending machines for condoms in washrooms was proposed by the director of a junior college in Trois Rivieres. But Quebec’s Education Minister Claude Ryan thought it “too ridiculous” to entertain seriously (Toronto Star, October 8. 1986).

However, the idea of promoting the condom and with it, the contraceptive mentality, is gathering strength. Since 1984 the Ontario Health Ministry has spent $2.5 million on AIDS information committees alone. Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae finds this nowhere near enough (Globe, November 18, 1986).

In Ontario, as elsewhere, there will be no attempt to attack the problem at its source, namely, sexual permissiveness. Indeed, since December 1986, the homosexual lifestyle has become protected under the Ontario Human Rights Act and, therefore, presumably cannot be criticized by public agencies. This would bring charges of “discrimination.”  The solution, therefore, is to push the condom with all possible haste.

Meanwhile, homosexual bath-houses, bars and gathering places appear immune from prosecution, perhaps because of the editorial rage of two of Toronto’s three papers, the Star and the Globe, against such attempts in the past. Homosexual and lesbian dances and theatres are advertised widely. Movies favorable to the homosexual are increasing by leaps and bounds. The 1986 Toronto Festival of Festivals included 23 full-length movies on homosexual themes from Canada, France, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and West Germany.

When Canadian customs officials ban books such as the Joy of Lesbian Sex as obscene – as they did in British Columbia in July 1986 – various ad hoc committees against custom censorship, usually joined by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, raise a hue and cry on behalf of freedom of thought.

The idea that this condom crusade will worsen matters, rather than decrease promiscuity, is laughed out the window, as, for example, by the editor of the Moncton Times Transcript, who derisively referred to “head-in-the-sand opponents” (December 13, 1986). The same term was employed by Toronto Star columnist Frank Jones (AIDS means sex education is necessary,” October 24, 1986).

Coercion

As for schools, some Canadians, too, are quite prepared to use coercion. When Toronto’s Globe and Mail was apprised of the existence of the Teachers for Life organization in July 1986, and heard that this group intended to promote a pro-family, pro-life ethic in the schools, its anger knew no bounds. “There is no place in the classroom for this crusade,” the paper thundered in its editorial entitled Blackboard politics (July 3).

But sex education according to the Planned Parenthood prescription is a different matter. This the Globe not only approves, but wants made compulsory. Nine years ago, in a February 1978 editorial entitled Us and It, the Globe argued that:

“While most, perhaps all public schools in Toronto provide some form of birth control counseling, it is frequently on a voluntary basis…It should be compulsory.”

In July 1986, it resumed this threatening tone. It demanded “vigorous efforts to dispel the ignorance that abets the spread of AIDS,” and spoke darkly of “most governments” remaining “immorally prudish in their tepid support of education campaigns…” (“Strategy against AIDS,” July 2, 1986).

The Toronto Star chimed in on November 1986 with its editorial “AIDS and education,” (November 11). It claimed that parents are unwilling to tell their children about AIDS – without, of course, providing a stitch of proof for this generalization. The editorialist noted that “this leaves it to the school…AIDS is a public health issue, one that we have to teach about, particularly young people…We expect that leadership to come from government.”

1969

Does anybody still remember how in 1967 and 1968 proposals to legalize contraceptives always included the earnest assertions that nobody, but nobody, would be compelled to have any involvement with it against his or her will?  Does anyone still remember that the legislation was passed in 1969 on the condition that there would be no advertising and no public, financial, outlay of any kind for contraceptives?  Apparently not.

It is a fact of modern times that those promoting unrestricted social and intellectual freedoms of every kind are most committed to state coercion and meddling of every sort. While demanding the removal of sexual restraints for themselves, they seek to bind, silence and indoctrinate those who disagree. As most Canadians still believe in the value of the family – according to the latest research – it is not too late to demand true sex education, which has nothing to do with contraceptives or abortion of condoms other than to reject them. Responsible sex education points to chastity, sexual relations with one partner within a (normal) marriage only, faithfulness, love and self-denial. In addition, it can point out the hazards of all other methods.