The Parent's Guide to Talking About Sex: A Complete Guide to Raising (Sexually) Safe, Smart, and Healthy Children

By Janet Rosenzweig

If your kids aren’t learning about sex from you, what are they learning about sex, and who is teaching them? Having the talk” with your child does not have to be a terrifying and awkward event. Armed with Dr. Janet Rosenzweig’s groundbreaking book, you may find you never need to have the talk.”
Dr. Rosenzweig illustrates how you can help protect your children from sexual abuse, trauma, and bullying through your everyday interactions with them. She walks you through the steps you can take to combine your own family’s values with age-appropriate information for children at all stages of development. And you’ll learn how to do so in a way that will improve the trust and communication between you and your child.
Dr. Rosenzweig applies her decades of experience in child abuse prevention, sexuality education, and family services to help you identify the real threats to your children’s safety and to protect them from becoming victims of sexual misinformation or exploitation. From choosing a child’s first daycare to meeting the multimedia challenges of adolescence, The Parent's Guide to Talking About Sex will coach you to raise sexually safe and healthy sons and daughters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781632207715

Janet Rosenzweig

Janet Rosenzweig, MS , PhD, MPA is a research associate for Prevent Child Abuse America. She earned her bachelor’s degree and master’s at Penn State, her PhD in social work from Rutgers, and her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA.

Book preview

PART 1

Wake Up and Smell the Pheromones

A Call to Action for Parents

CHAPTER 1

Building the Foundation: Sex, Love, and Family Life

Sex is part of life. That’s not news. The institutions of our country are doing a lousy job teaching kids about sex, and I mean all institutions—the family, our schools, religious institutions, and others. That’s not news either. The lack of accurate information about sex provided by loving, trusted adults is a danger to the health and safety of our children, and parents have an obligation to do something about it. That’s news, and this book is written for every parent willing to take the steps necessary to raise a sexually safe and healthy child. It’s never too early or too late to start.

Parents need a broad lens to understand relationships, sexual health, sexual abuse, and sexual safety, and understand how vital these issues are to a healthy family life. Parents need the tools to help them communicate with their kids; they can and must learn to weave their own values and beliefs with accurate and age-appropriate information and present them as a gift to their children.

Loving relationships are the foundation for a happy, healthy life, and there are many things parents can do help their children develop the tools they need to experience them!

In this chapter, we set the tone for the book by encouraging a broad understanding of relationships, sexual health and safety and the many ways parents can influence their child’s psychosexual and social development.

Learning about Relationships

Parents can make a huge contribution to their child’s social development by sharing their values about relationships, intimacy, love and eventually sex; this greatly increases the odds of kids achieving fulfilling mature relationships. In the last twenty years, highly publicized cases of child sexual abuse motivated many parents to discuss sexual abuse and that’s a start. Horrible cases of bullied victims acting out with violence against themselves or others have opened some conversations about how we treat others. But discussions about sex and relationships that focus on the negative—necessary though they may be—are not enough to promote overall sexual health and safety.

Kids need and deserve positive messages as well, and parents are the ideal source.

America’s Kids after Megan’s Law

The tragic rape and murder of Megan Kanka in 1994 mobilized the nation to be on the lookout for child molesters. Megan’s killer was the classic horror-story villain luring an innocent child to a terrible death with stories of a puppy dog. The nation’s outrage spurred legislators to act in all 50 states. Megan’s Law make it possible for parents to find the addresses of convicted sex offenders in their neighborhood. Sex offender registries and Internet searches may help prevent further crimes by leveraging public attention to keep violators from acting out. But compulsions are not cured by public scrutiny and registries capture only the small minority of offenders who are reported, caught, tried, and convicted. Two decades later, we know that Megan’s Law is not enough to keep our children safe, and we’ve also learned more about what parents can do.

Government agencies publish similarly limited statistical reports telling us how many thousands of children were bullied or sexually abused each year. But statistics are not about protection and they only report the number of people who were caught or cases reported. Statistical reports give no insight or protection from the teenage babysitter who encourages her charge to get naked to earn extra TV time, or the coach whose hugs are just too tight or even or the child who is too humiliated by taunts from peers to even tell his or her parents. When parents discuss a full range of age-appropriate issues around relationships and sexuality, they’re giving their children a gift.

Too many kids lack the language to tell anyone about the creepy people, whose behaviors confuse and frighten them. Too many adolescents find themselves in sexually charged situations they barely understand but think everyone else does and are therefore shamed into silence. Even the most well-mannered adolescents don’t fully grasp how devastating their taunts or uninvited touches can be to others. By preparing kids with the critical tools like empathy, language and information about sex and relationships, and open communication, parents also teach that they are a resource when problems need to be resolved or questions need to be answered. Parents can give children the tools they need to protect themselves and be kinder to others.

These tools are particularly important because we know that too many kids are quietly violated by peers or adults in their lives, and are stunned into silence and shame that lasts for decades. We know that too many kids experience their first sexual arousal in a context riddled with confusion, guilt, shame or fear; even unwanted touch can cause a physical reaction of arousal. Loving, prepared parents are the very best people to inoculate kids from shame and confusion by lovingly sharing knowledge and language.

While sexual abuse of children regularly makes its way into media these days, there is nothing new about adults sexually abusing children. Long before I ever heard the term child sexual abuse I was a teenaged camp counselor who didn’t know what to do about the little girl who came to camp with bruises on her thighs and blood in her underwear. A decade later, I was working on one of the first federally funded child sexual abuse projects in the United States; a reporter began to cry during our interview as she remembered her own abuse. Months later, a male colleague described being seduced as a teen by an adult female neighbor and wanted to know if that counted as abuse, a woman who had spent more than 50 years feeling sullied spoke for the first time of being fondled at age 8 by a man dating her mother.

During this time in my career, I began to grasp the scope and depth of this tragedy. I began to realize the terrible consequences and saw that our best efforts were not relieving the problem or the affected families’ trauma. Along with the hundreds of families seeking help from the program I managed, relatives, friends, strangers, and colleagues also shared their secret shame, profound anger, sadness, and confusion. An understanding of sexuality and sexual response and a trusted adult to confide in could have presented some of these events, and lessened the pain of others.

Everyone knows someone whose life has been touched by sexual victimization. Look at the published numbers: some studies suggest 70,000 kids each year, others suggest 90,000. Some studies say one out of seventeen kids is victimized; others say it could be one out of four. Regardless of the source, the number of affected children is huge. These findings have become the rallying cries of advocates, and many professionals remind us that these reports are only the tip of the iceberg.

But frankly, I can’t stand the statistics about child sexual abuse. Besides the obvious differences in definitions and counting methods that make statisticians cringe, statistics dehumanize the unbearable pain caused to children and those who love them. More meaningful than any statistic is the heartbreaking truth that too many of us remember a sad friend from childhood, a college friend who confided why they have lousy relationships, someone you dated, a friend of your child’s. Startling statistics pose another problem. They can leave us feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed—and rarely inspire any specific action to change anything at all. But, if we each focus on our child, our family, our community, we can make a difference!

Far from the statistics we find stories like Sugar Ray Leonard, who was sexually abused by a boxing coach, or child actor Todd Bridges, molested as a child actor by his publicist. There are thousands of unreported victims, known personally by many who will read this book. Many readers will shudder as they recognize and remember the touchy-feely coach, the over-affectionate step-parent, aunt or uncle, or the seductive baby-sitter.

As if we need another reason to look beyond the numbers, try this question: when you hear the name Monica Lewinsky, do you think victim? She was never counted in any database even though she was sexually involved with a teacher for years! If we believe the adage that children learn what they live, just think what Monica may have learned from her high school drama teacher—how to trade sex for status, and how to lie. American history was altered because a teacher thought his own sexual gratification was more important than the developing spirit of a young woman. Parents need to look closely at the sexual climate in the institutions serving their child and this book will help them to understand how.

How about actor/singer Mackenzie Philips? Raised to accept her special status in a special family, she was never counted as a statistic even though her life was marred in unimaginable ways by becoming her famous father’s lover while still a child.¹ And speaking of sitcom stars, Todd Bridges’s heartbreaking description (in his biography, Killing Willis)² of his profound confusion from climaxing while being molested by his agent is a more compelling argument for educating children about their bodies than any author could ever compose. Bridges’s honesty on national television inspired Sugar Ray Leonard to describe in his autobiography his experience of being molested by an Olympic boxing coach. Hearing Tyler Perry tearfully tell Oprah Winfrey that his body betrayed him with an erection during oral sex forced on him by an adult provided another national call to educate our kids. We cannot continue to let molesters convince victims that they were complicit in forced sexual acts because their body displayed a physiologically uncontrollable autonomic reflex. We can’t continue to leave our adolescents vulnerable to exploitation by predatory adults because they mistake physiologic arousal—lust—for some other emotion.

Sex Education Before We Killed It

In my early work for a child sexual abuse project three decades ago, I traveled the country lecturing and training professionals on the importance of understanding human sexuality when working in child sexual abuse. I was hired to work on a sex-abuse help line by a social services agency director who believed my degree in health education and certification as a sex educator would make a great match with a social worker experienced in child abuse cases; we would team up and learn from each other and handle calls that came in. We took hundreds of calls each month from kids of both genders and adults trying to find words to describe their confusion or their violation.

Within a year, my unique perspective as a sex educator was in demand and the national training tours were on. Social workers, law enforcement staff, counselors, youth workers, and educators were among the people I reached with good, clinical information on anatomy, physiology, and psychosexual development of children. Lecture halls and seminars rooms were always filled and no one ever doubted the value of this material. It was common sense that people needed to understand sexuality to work in child sexual abuse. It was considered common sense that kids needed language about sexuality to communicate with the adults in their lives. There was never any controversy and I offered this training in churches, law enforcement training centers, university classrooms, and community centers. The positive responses of the professionals who recognized how this information would make them better at their work in child sexual abuse was among the most rewarding aspects of my professional life.

I left the lecture circuit when I became a mother and my career expanded into other areas of public human services from the mid-’80s until 2001. When I returned to the field of child abuse prevention, I was shocked to see not only a lack of progress, but downright degeneration on the point of sexuality. Sometime during the abstinence-only, anti-sex-education binge of the 1990s, people forgot how important good sexuality education is in promoting overall sexual health, sustaining strong marriages and families, supporting overall personal mental health, preventing child sexual abuse, and intervening if a child is victimized! The politics of fear stopped even qualified and well-meaning adults from talking to kids about sex, and the sexuality component disappeared from many professional training curricula for child sexual abuse. Support for overall sexual health and safety was extraordinarily difficult to find. Members of the generation raised in that environment are now raising families of their own and they need help.

The Neutered Nineties

Fifty years ago, sex education focused on helping a child understand his body. In the first frames of an educational film produced in 1966 entitled Parent to Child About Sex³ we hear a woman say Today, everyone tells us that we should talk to our kids about sex, but nobody tells us how. The movie was written by a professor of psychiatry, and the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at a major medical school. It credits consultants from the National Council of Churches of Christ, a dean at Notre Dame and the Chair of the National Commission on Marriage and Family Life from the Synagogue Council of America and it presents more frank and explicit information than any film made for parents this decade. In fact, the scene of a baby playing with his penis while on a doctor’s exam table—with an authoritative voice-over explaining that curiously is normal—might be considered grounds for criminal charges today! The 1960s brought us the sexual revolution, fueled by the freedom allowed by the birth control pill and other changes in society, and children needed sex education more than ever to be prepared for a healthy and happy adulthood. National professional associations were formed and curricula developed and promulgated nationally.

Sex Education in Schools—from comprehensive to abstinence only in one generation

By the 1970s and 1980s concerns over sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies brought a focus on these topics to public schools,⁴ with most states mandating health education on these topics. Then politics intervened. Religious conservatives built a movement based, in part, on their opposition to sex instruction in the public schools.⁵ The conflicts continued into the 1980’s with states continuing to mandate sexuality education, and some delegating responsibility for the content to local school boards.

While the majority of public school districts mandate sexuality education, researchers found a shrinking of the scope of sexual health curricula from the 1980s to the 1990s as school districts responded to the boost in federal funds for abstinence-only sexuality education.⁶ Cash-strapped school districts and community-based organizations eagerly took advantage of the hundreds of millions of federal dollars allocated in those decades to promote that narrow point of view. Accepting these funds required teaching abstinence as the only sure method of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and infections and preventing pregnancy, and restricted other topics that could be covered. Programs receiving these abstinence education funds may not endorse or promote contraceptive use.⁷ Moreover, objective, federally funded evaluators found early on that . . . abstinence funds are changing the local landscape of approaches to teenage pregnancy prevention and youth risk avoidance.⁸ The amount of accurate information available to kids shrunk, in classrooms and youth serving community based organizations throughout the United States, leaving kids vulnerable to myths, misinformation and predators.

This restrictive funding continued to promote the narrow perspectives of sexuality health information even as the researchers found that programs had no statistically significant impact on eventual behavior.⁹ During this same period, research also suggests that there is a large gap between what teachers believe should be taught regarding sexuality education and what is actually taught in the classroom.¹⁰ The same source reports that even if a district allowed teaching of contraception and other sensitive topics, a significant number of teachers avoided them because they feared adverse community reaction. Even if teachers were allowed to teach it, many felt unprepared. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a study around this time found that many teachers responsible for teaching sexual heath wanted more training.

The 1990s saw an unfortunate combination of events that essentially muzzled sex educators: federal funding to schools and youth agencies mandating limits on topics covered, reliance on technology and offenders registries to keep children sexually safe, and vocal minority hijacking public opinion and shaming health professionals into silence. Simultaneously, Internet connections were making their way into more and more households; instead of being educated through approved curricula delivered by trained educators, young people went online for unregulated information about sex and relationships, finding myths, misinformation, and increasingly violent pornography.

The neutered ’90s saw the unfortunate coincidence of sex abuse prevention focusing on sex offender registries at the same time that the sex education was squelched and public health officials were bullied into silence about sex. The result? Adults stopped talking about sex to kids! The politics of fear interfered with health and common sense. Federally driven abstinence-only policies for sex education and politics frightened too many professionals into silence. The sex education component of sex abuse prevention programs disappeared, replaced by stranger-danger coloring books, criminal background checks and ratings of nanny cams. Some of these products and programs have value, but we must get back to the basics of parent-child communication and sharing of accurate information.

Parents may feel powerless to help given the tens of thousands of sex abuse victims cited in the statistics, or the almost half-million adolescent girls who get pregnant each year,¹¹ and hundreds of thousands of boys and men who participated, but every parent can help their child and many more by examining their own history, thoughts, and feelings, and developing skills to consciously choose what they convey to their children about relationships an sexuality.

If you are a parent, especially a parent who completed school when access to comprehensive sexuality education was limited, it is quite likely that you feel unprepared for this challenge. This challenge becomes greater for the many parents who fall into the huge category of uncounted victims; the task of actively working to raise a sexually safe and healthy child can seem even more formidable. But parents must be able to talk to their kids about sex, and this book is dedicated to providing them with a resource to help.

It’s time to get back to basics. The current generation of parents need the tools to be the primary sexuality educators of their children, to be the eyes and ears assessing the sexual climate in the community and the institutions serving your children, to be aware of the signs that something is making your child uncomfortable. Parents need to know how to respond if they sense trouble, and how to raise kids who share that knowledge.

There are things that every adult can do and this book spells them out for parents, teachers, caregivers, mental health professionals, and public servants. An awareness of and open communication about healthy relationships and sexual health and safety can make children happier, families stronger, and communities safer. There are good strategies for adults who find the courage to make it happen.

So Why Don’t We Talk?

I’ve heard so many reasons for parental inaction on this subject. Parents tell me that they just wouldn’t know where to start if they wanted to have a conversation about sexuality in general or sexual abuse prevention. Many divorced parents assume the other parent covered this if they’re the same gender as the child or have custody of the child. Many parents just don’t want to think of sex and their child at the same time in any way at all.

Parents can fool themselves into thinking things will be fine. Some parents will wait until their kids get to school and hope their district provides a good sexual health education or child safety program. Maybe the Scouts will have special programs, or the Sunday school. But programs provided by strangers discussing concepts that may be completely foreign to your child can’t possibly have the same effect as a loving dialog; there is no substitute for a permanently open line of communication with parents. Parents delay opening up that line when they’re scared that they won’t be able to handle what comes in. Most parents aren’t aware that research shows that teens say parents most influence their decisions about sex more than peers or media.¹²

I get completely confounded when parents say that their parents didn’t tell them anything about sex and they turned out OK. If you insist on dragging out that old chestnut, then I ask you if OK is good enough for your child. Remember your own confusion, fear, and embarrassment? Wouldn’t you want to spare your child that discomfort? You can! And your kids will love you for it! Actually, so will their friends when your kids share their new information with less well-informed friends.

Our goal as parents is to ensure that when adolescence eventually ends, the result of our efforts is a healthy, productive adult who will eventually produce our grandchildren. That can’t happen without sex.

A Call to Action

It’s human nature to want to take the easiest path, no matter where the journey. During the last 30 years we have chosen the easy road when it comes to our children’s sexual health and safety:

•   We let governments make laws that discourage true sex education.

•   We have allowed computer software and other automation to take the place of our own oversight when it comes to protecting our children from online predators and pornographic websites.

•   We let ourselves believe that lifetime prosecution of sex offenders of every kind actually prevents abuse by unknown predators in the future.

•   We fail to include promoting sexual health and safety in our parenting to-do list.

After 30 years, we can see that these oversimplified prescriptions have failed to protect our children and have delivered a generation of men and women whose children will face the same unnecessary risks and ignorance.

If you’ve read this far, you know you want to do better. The chapters that follow will help you protect your child and strengthen your family, and be part of a sexually safe and healthy community.

This requires no heroic effort at all—it’s actually pretty easy. But the results will be heroic—children who understand how to relate to others, how their bodies work, how to protect themselves, and how to have happy and fulfilling sex lives when they become adults.

Let’s get started.

_____________________

1     Mackenzie Phillips, High on Arrival (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009).

2     Todd Bridges with Sarah Tomlinson, Killing Willis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 67–70.

3     Vintage 1966 Sex Ed Film: ‘Parent To Child About Sex,’ YouTube video, 30:41, posted by shaggylocks, February 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qx0LuPJ91o.

4     http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=1341&nodeID=1

5     Johannah Cornblatt, A Brief History of Sex Ed in America, Newsweek, October 27, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001.

6     Cynthia Dailard, Sex Education: Politicians, Parents, Teachers and Teens, The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 4, no. 1 (February 2001).

7     Barbara Devaney et al., The Evaluation of Abstinence Education Programs Funded Under Title V Section 510 Interim Report. (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., 2002).

8     Ibid.

9     Christopher Trenholm et al., Impacts of Four Title V Section 510 Abstinence Only Education Programs, Final Report. (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research, 2007).

10   Dailard et al., Sex Education.

11   Teen Pregnancy and Childbearing, US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Adolescent Health, last modified February 12, 2015, http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/reproductive-health/teen-pregnancy/index.html.

12   Bill Albert, With One Voice 2012: America’s Adults and Teens Sound Off About Teen Pregnancy (Washington, DC: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2012), 6.

CHAPTER 2

Banishing the Birds, Bees, Storks, and Ostriches

Why Parents Don’t Talk with Their Kids about Sex

As discussed in the previous chapter, many adults who work with children have stopped talking to them about sex. But where does that leave you as a parent? Every generation of parents has displayed a wide range of comfort (or discomfort) discussing sexuality, and as much variation in their choice of when and how to teach their children about sexuality. I’ve heard the fears of a thirty-year-old mother echoing the memories of a seventy-year-old; no generation has cornered the market on having the sex talk correctly or getting it wrong. This generation of parents may be at a disadvantage from growing up in the neutered nineties, but their great-grandparents didn’t fare much better coming of age in the last throes of Victorian repression.

Most adults find the words birds and bees easier to say than penis and vagina. The dreaded conversation about sex has been fodder for many a TV show or comedy skit. But now it’s time to be honest about the subconscious reasons these topics are avoided or made into a joke. We as parents don’t want to think of our kids as sexual beings. We don’t want to embarrass our kids. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves. We don’t know what to say. We may even be afraid that our kids know more about some things that we do.

If you are a parent whose idea of sex information is to let your kid believe that babies come from a stork, and if you are a parent who deals with sexuality education by emulating an ostrich with his head in the sand hoping that things will come out all right, it’s time to wake up. Kids know about sex, and it’s silly at best and dangerous at worst to pretend they don’t. The real question you should be asking is what do they know? If the information didn’t come from a trusted and prepared adult, it’s probably incorrect. If the values didn’t come from you as the parent, there’s a good chance that your children’s values around sexuality are a closer reflection to those seen in the media than yours.

Even if it is difficult for us as parents to articulate our fears of speaking with our children about sex, most of us do want effective strategies and tactics to reach and teach our children, so let’s look at the most common reasons parents give for not talking with their children about sex.

So Why Don’t We Talk?

1. Is it our fear that we don’t know what we’re talking about?

She probably already knows more than I do, moaned the father of a twelve-year-old when I asked if he’d talked to his daughter about sex yet. I’ll feel like an idiot if I say something and she tells me I’m wrong! Adolescents can take great pride in making their parents feel and appear stupid, so the best strategy is to not be stupid! The materials presented in chapter 4 are more than enough to put you on a level playing field with your child when it comes to talking about sex.

This father is not alone in his belief that his child already knows more about sex than he. But here’s the rub—even if by some chance your child has been lucky enough to have a world-class sex educator in school who did a magnificent job teaching every aspect of reproductive biology, maybe even the physiology of human sexual response, your child still does not know what’s important to you in terms of their sexual awareness. Your child needs to know your values on the relationship between sex and love, your thoughts on contraceptives, your wishes for your son’s or daughter’s sexual health and safety, and that you want to be there for them to support their sexual health and safety. If your child asks you a question that you don’t know how to answer, you can feel comfortable replying, Let me find out more about that and we’ll talk again tomorrow. Children recognize, at a certain point, that you cannot know the answers to everything and they will respect you for being honest and showing an interest in finding out an answer to their difficult questions about sex.

2. Is it (small p) political?

Some of you may feel that sex, like driving, is a privilege to be earned and that your child has not yet earned the right to participate. Repressive political regimes seek to control out-groups by denying access to education; other societies have denied woman equal access to education to promote domesticity, but revolutions have proven this strategy useless. The truth is that knowledge is power. We send our kids to a good school and save money to get them through college so they can be sent out into the world fortified with a broad range of information. This, in turn, will hopefully allow them to successfully compete in adult society. We cannot deny our children the knowledge of a critical health issue simply because of the mistaken belief that they have not earned the right to know this grown–up stuff until a certain age.

3. Is it (capitol P) Political?

Conservative political action groups often use the responsibility of public schools to provide sexuality education as an example of government interfering with a family’s values. The damage, however, from excluding certain bodily systems and functions from comprehensive health education is aggravated when parents or other institutions aren’t adequately prepared to fill in these knowledge gaps in our society’s youth.

You can become a partner with your child’s school and find a way to participate in making choices about the sexual education curriculum. Do you want your child to take part in an abstinence-only program? Do you want your child to learn about contraception? Do you want your child to know reproductive anatomy? Call your local school district and drill down to find where the decision is made about sex education curricula. Is the content medically accurate? How do the values taught in the curriculum fit with your personal values? Will both genders be taught the same thing about sex? Will the classes be co-ed? If you sense that the values being taught are different than yours, consider this an opportunity to have a frank discussion with your child about your family’s values, and why you hold them, and how much you hope that your child will adopt the same ones despite what they may hear in sex-ed classes at school.

In some communities, learning how to influence the content of sexuality education curricula has become a cause celeb among groups with one specific point of view, which may counter your own. This background noise of political confrontation drowns out the important message; young people need age-appropriate, medically accurate information about sexuality. Check out the curriculum, and read the text book. If the messages do not match what you want your child to know, take the opportunity to ensure that your child knows what you believe and why.

The political conservatives who oppose sex education (who ran Joycelyn Elders out of office), and who want to deny low income women subsidized reproductive health care, claim that sex is a private matter and not the subject of a public discussion. I