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-Deep in southern Georgia,
in a region that has long grappled
with the issue of teenage pregnancy,
sits the small town of Cairo.
For the past few years, Daphne Melissa McClendon
has been teaching sex education at the high school
-We're gonna talk about contraception, okay?
Ways to prevent pregnancy.
Question: Why do men need that information?
At the beginning, it was difficult for me.
I did grapple with, you know,
"I don't know that this is what I need to be doing,"
because I did feel like, "Hey, I'm a Christian.
I don't know that I believe
in giving this kind of information out."
And I also didn't want them to think that I was saying,
"Hey, it's okay to have sex."
-The question of what public schools should teach teens
about sex has roiled communities around the country for decades,
but the roots of today's sex ed conflicts lie in the 1990s,
when the stakes of the debate were brought into sharp relief
after years of high teen pregnancy rates
and the spread of AIDS.
-An emotional new battle over sex education
in public schools in this country.
-How much should children be told about safe sex,
and is this a case of "the more you know, the more you do"?
-Today the U.S. Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders,
called for comprehensive health and sex education
from kindergarten through 12th grade.
-I think I tick a lot of people off
that refuse to deal openly and honestly
about the predicament of our children today.
I feel that if you don't understand
and can't control your reproduction,
you can't control your life.
-While working in Arkansas, first as a doctor
and then as the state health director,
Joycelyn Elders came to embrace comprehensive sex education,
age-appropriate, fact-based instruction on topics
as varied as anatomy, relationships,
and contraception.
-I always tell young women, you know,
"Don't ever go out on a date
with anybody you like without a condom in your purse."
-But backlash to Elders and the approach to sex ed
she advocated for mounted quickly.
-With evangelistic fury she preaches
that teenagers should have a love affair with the condom.
-They call them condoms because it's a con job
and they're dumb.
And we feel like that's what we're telling kids.
They're being conned into believing
that they can have safe sex.
They can't.
-A growing number of people
felt instruction on birth control
could prompt teens to have sex.
Instead, they felt young people
should only be taught abstinence --
no sex at all until marriage.
-I think that abstinence has been lacking
in much of the education.
-It was an idea first funded under the Reagan administration
and supported in the years that followed
by the increasingly influential religious right.
-The new curriculum
says it emphasizes Christian morality and chastity.
-Teenagers are told there is no safe sex outside of marriage.
They are not taught contraception.
Instead, they are taught slogans
like, "Control your urgin' and be a virgin,"
and "Pet your dog, not your date."
-They certainly were not the appropriate programs
for the young people that I was accustomed to dealing with.
-It's kind of like you can think of it
in terms of Russian Roulette.
What is it -- one in six that you're gonna die?
When you use a condom,
it's like you're playing Russian Roulette.
-What if I want to have sex before I get married?
-Well, I guess you just have to be prepared to die.
-Every mother I know, every father I know,
we all talk and support abstinence,
but also we need to make sure
that we educate our young people
on how to protect themselves.
People will say, "Well, condoms will break."
But always remember
that the vows of abstinence
break far more easily
than does latex condoms.
-This week, she went too far even for the President.
She said that children should be taught
in school about masturbation.
-I think that, that is something
that's a part of human sexuality,
and it is a part of something
that perhaps should be taught.
-President Clinton today fired
his outspoken U.S. Surgeon General,
Joycelyn Elders.
Mr. Clinton demanded and got her resignation...
-If I had it all to do over again,
I'd do it exactly the same way.
I did it right the first time.
-The ousting of Elders provided easy fodder
for late-night television.
-If mashterbation is not taught in the ha-ome,
then it must be taught in the schools.
-But it also signaled a shift in the national mood
as a Republican majority took control of Congress
in 1994
and abstinence-only gained political ground.
-The best thing of all is for teens to avoid sex,
and I was hoping it would be possible to promote that
by programs in the high schools.
I thought we ought to try it.
I thought it was a worthy investment.
-When President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act,
it included a provision on abstinence,
which Ron Haskins helped draft.
It provided federal funds for states to teach programs
under a strict definition of abstinence-only.
-It's a symbol of this is something
that the federal government supports,
and we should support it among the states,
and it could grow.
And that was what the people who supported this legislature
had in mind -- to start a movement, so to speak.
-I told Bill Clinton
that of all the things that he'd done,
that was the one thing that I would never forgive him for.
I was very upset about that.
I'm still upset about it.
-What you saw was a lot of local communities --
that really wanted this education --
for the very first time were able to implement it.
-Mary Anne Mosack ran an Ohio-based
abstinence-only organization
that received an injection of federal funds
as the political climate grew even friendlier.
-Abstinence for young people is the only certain way
to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.
-That was a very good time for us
in terms of expanding our message and our programming.
-But over the years,
researchers had been evaluating abstinence-only.
One multiyear study released in 2007
compared students who had gone through
federally-funded abstinence-only programs
with their classmates who had not.
-When I first saw the report, I was amazed.
They would show the score for the experimental group
and a score for the control group,
and those bar graphs were just exactly the same height.
-The study found that students who took part in the programs
became sexually active at the same age
as those who didn't and had about the same number
of sexual partners.
-I would describe myself
as discouraged about abstinence-only.
Most of the evidence shows
that the more comprehensive programs are more effective.
-There is a lot of evidence
about what kinds of programs work.
The scientific consensus is really there.
-Leslie Kantor, a sexual health researcher and longtime advocate
of sex education points to findings
that have repeatedly shown that comprehensive sex ed
has significant effects on delaying teen sex,
reducing sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancies,
and increasing the use of contraception.
-It turns out that when you give young people information
as well as the skills that they're going to need
to navigate in relationships, those are the young people
who are actually able to wait longer to have sex.
-Governors began rejecting some of the federal abstinence money.
-Congress spent more than $1.5 billion
on abstinence-only sex education,
an approach many now call a failure.
-And with the Obama administration
came a large-scale effort to fund the programs
with the most scientific evidence behind them.
-It really was the first time, in this area at least,
when the government was actually
starting to bring science to bear.
-But sex ed is ultimately a state and local issue,
and there are striking differences
in what's taught in schools around the country
and whether certain topics are covered at all.
-What you actually end up seeing
is that we are teaching less about birth control as a country
than we did before all of this abstinence-only money
came into play.
If we have increasing evidence
of a body of programs that works,
then why wouldn't we get behind those evidence-based programs?
-The Trump administration has prioritized abstinence-only,
now being referred to as sexual risk avoidance,
and while some of these programs now include some information
on contraception,
their underlying message remains essentially the same --
Teens should avoid sex, hopefully until marriage.
-We're guiding you toward risk elimination,
risk avoidance to eliminate risk.
So when I'm talking about about contraception,
I'm giving you all the information,
but I'm also putting into context
that the only 100% safe way to avoid pregnancy
or STD is sexual risk avoidance.
It's interesting because sometimes students
don't ever hear that message
that they don't have to have sex.
-The idea that abstinence-only is a fabulous idea
is an ideology.
It's not supported by good data.
I'm concerned that if we have public debates
that are based on ideology,
that we're not gonna make public decisions
based on evidence and experience.
That's what we should try to do.
-Cairo, Georgia, is trying to do just that.
A group of women had begun meeting regularly
to discuss the issues they faced locally.
-We had religious people,
non-religious people,
very liberal, very conservative
all come together to say,
"What can we do as women
to make a difference in Grady County?"
-One night, the subject of teen pregnancy came up.
-One of us arrived late.
She goes, "It's been a day.
In a community I was in just northwest of here,
there are three 10-year-olds pregnant.
What can we do?"
As we got to talking, everybody knew a story.
Everybody knew somebody affected.
-Nationally since the 1990s,
teen pregnancy rates have declined dramatically.
Teens are having less sex today than in the past,
and more are using contraception when they do.
But some communities, like Grady County,
are still challenged by the problems of teen pregnancy
and sexually transmitted infections,
and the Cairo women viewed comprehensive sex ed
as part of the solution.
-When you put the data on the table
about what's happening to our kids,
political barriers go away.
-Teresa Gee Hardy, a school board member
long involved with the church, helped get pastors
and faith-based organizations on board with the idea.
-There's a scripture that talks about "my people perish
because a lack of knowledge."
Teens suffer because of lack of knowledge.
Teen pregnancy rate is high because of lack of knowledge.
-Grady County is now in the fifth year
of its comprehensive sex ed program,
and according to the district superintendent,
feedback from teachers and students has been positive.
-Let's look at what we talked about yesterday --
relationships, healthy and unhealthy relationship tests.
I think my role is to give them the information
to make sure that they understand
that I'm not judging them,
but I want them to be informed,
and I want them to be empowered.
-I think our community can be a model
in the sense that, yes, this is scary.
Yes, we're very conservative.
Yes, we're very Christian.
But yes, we're looking out
for what's best for our kids.
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