According to the doctrine of the proponents of More and Increasingly-Explicit Sex and Contraceptive Education in Schools, such a programme would lead to a sexual utopia: unwanted pregnancies would cease to be; there would be no more unwanted or battered children; life would be wonderful. If, however, we look at Sweden, the country with the longest history of school sex education and officially promoted contraception, we find a sexual revolution that has caused social havoc that is nothing less than catastrophic. The difficulty is to get the genie back into the bottle!
“Today pseudo-sex leaders and government officials play a different tune. They readily admit that the whole sex education programme has gone too far, that the directives suggested were naïve indeed, that the young people today have no sense of values, that society is crumbling, that more government control is needed, and that young people are not ready for the sex information given in school. The state-appointed Commission on Sex Education admits that, because of the laws, it is hard to curtail early sexual relationships and sexual irresponsibility. All are agreed that different guidelines and constraints are needed for children and adolescents, but which? They never speak of values.”
This quotation is taken from a report “Sex in Sweden”, which was written last year (1982) by the Rev. Paul Marx, the President of Human Life International. Unfortunately, lack of space prevents our printing the full report, but the facts and statistics are so revealing that they can provide valid and valuable arguments for those attempting to counter attempts to impose similar programmes in Canada. We have taken the liberty of highlighting some information from Father Marx’s study.
Education in Socialist Sweden is strictly controlled by the state and the official sex-education programme (the result of a close collaboration of the Swedish Sex Education Association [R.F.S.U.] and International Planned Parenthood Federation) has explicit sex and contraception indoctrination beginning in kindergarten. “The kindergarten book I examined is loaded with contraception.” Children twelve years and younger are given contraceptives, and today it is suggested that similar supplies be given to seven and nine year olds. It follows that older children and adults have ready access to contraceptives. And what are the results?
1968-1974 Venereal Disease for girls under 14 increased 900%
1968-1974 Number of abortions for mothers under 14 increased 200%
1966-1973 Percentage of new mothers who were unmarried rose from 14.5 to 28%
1971-1975 Percentage of legal abortions of all teenage pregnancies rose from 32.6
to 50%
1960-1980 Reported abortions in Sweden (pop. 8,000,000) rose from 2,792 to 36,000
In 1981 this dropped to 33,000
1960-1981 Number of live births dropped from 102,219 to 92,000
1972-1974 Rape increased by 400%
Today 92% of all pregnant girls 15 or under have abortions.
Over 85% of boys and 70% of girls have sexual relations before they are 18 years. The average girl’s age at ‘sexual debut’ being 14.2
Other effects on society are readily apparent: open pornography; a widespread increase in venereal diseases; divorce; the destruction of the family. “The president of R.F.S.U. admits that in the five years (1974- 1979), when he headed that organization, the role and importance of marriage was never even discussed.”
Where are the religious leaders in this debacle? Lutheran church leaders are virtually helpless because although 97% of the population nominally belong to this state religion, church attendance is almost non-existent. The Catholic Church has 100,000 members, and 85% of these are immigrants, mainly Poles, Italians and Spaniards. Unfortunately the position of the Church was weakened by its ambivalent attitude to contraception and by a statement of the Scandinavian hierarchy dissenting from Humanae Vitae.
But they too are having second thoughts. In fact, one of the bishops told me that: “had they known of the sexual outbreak after Humanae Vitae, they would have written a different reaction.”
Father Marx concludes his report by an appeal to North Americans to learn from Sweden’s mistakes. He asks for the implementation of a sex-education programme which will have its roots in moral law, which will encourage loving family relationships, which will teach Natural Family Planning, and which will stress personality and spirituality in their relationships to sexuality.
“The crisis of Western civilization is fundamentally spiritual. As Dostoyevski remarked long ago, ‘If God is not, then nothing is morally wrong.’ For most Swedes, God is dead, and so is basic objective morality.”