O nce when I was about nine, I wandered into my aunt's kitchen during Thanksgiving to find all the grown-up women whispering, hugging, and crying. When they explained to me what was going on Auntie Cookie had just found out she was going to have another baby and they were crying from happiness , they confirmed a story I already knew--the one about how babies just happen, and women to whom they happen are considered very lucky.
How else to explain the crying? A few years later, when my friend Phyllis told me her parents were "trying to make" another baby, I had the crashing revelation that human actions create babies. Reading about unwed mothers and welfare these days, I can't help but think the nation is in need of a crash course in sex education. According to an article by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in the Atlantic Monthly last October, we've got lots of public school sex education programs, but they're teaching the wrong thing.
Under the guise of "family life education," she wrote, the programs are just ideological bearers of the sexual revolution of the sixties, encouraging anything-goes sexuality for young people. Whitehead thinks there should be more straight talk about the downside of teen pregnancy and illegitimacy, especially for girls, because "girls bear the burdens and penalties of nonconjugal sex.
But Whitehead herself betrays some of the mindset that generates this unequal burden. She describes all the bad consequences for teenage girls who "get pregnant," "find themselves pregnant," and "experience pregnancy.
W hitehead's article got me thinking about that great American textbook of sex education, The Scarlet Letter. Even those who haven't read it know its central image: An adulterous woman is forced by her community to wear a scarlet letter "A" as a sign of her depravity and a foreboding lesson to other women.
