By Hannah Natanson

Sweating in the sun, two dozen teenagers spread themselves across picnic blankets in a grassy park and prepared to discuss the facts of life they never learned in school.

Behind them on a folding table, bouquets of pamphlets offered information teachers at school would never share — on the difference between medical and surgical abortions, and how to get them. Beside the pamphlets sat items adults at school would never give: pregnancy tests and six-packs of My Way Emergency Contraceptive.

Emma Rose Smith, 17, rose from the blankets, tucked her pale-blonde hair behind her ears and turned off the music on a small, black speaker. She faced the assembled high-schoolers, all members of her newfound group, Teens for Reproductive Rights, and began talking about the nonprofit Abortion Care Tennessee. Her words hitched at first, then tumbled in a rush.

“A little bit about them,” Emma Rose said, “is they’re an organization that funds people’s abortions if they can’t afford it. Also, by the way, there’s another organization that we can also talk about later, when we give you guys, like, resources, that actually does free mail-in abortion pills.”

Twelve days after the teens’ picnic, abortion would become illegal in Tennessee, a measure made possible by the Supreme Court’s June decision, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade. The students wouldn’t hear anything about it in school: State law does not require sex education, and it holds that schools in areas with high pregnancy rates must offer “family life education” focused on abstinence.

Listen to the Tennessee teens describe their experiences of sex education.

Post-Roe, the teens in the park had decided, this lack of education was no longer acceptable. They are part of a burgeoning movement of high-schoolers nationwide who, after Roe’s fall, are stepping up to demand more comprehensive lessons on reproduction, contraception and abortion — and who, if the adults refuse, are teaching each other instead.

In Utah, high-schoolers rallied outside a courthouse in May to call for accurate education on sex and abortion. In Texas, a group of teens held a virtual protest on the gaming website Minecraft to urge the state to start giving middle-schoolers lessons on birth control. Over the summer, that group — Fort Bend Students United for Reproductive Freedom — began sharing mini-sex-education lessons to its Instagram account for the benefit of peers; recent posts include “Endometrial Ablation,” “Pap smears” and “WHAT IS PCOS?” (polycystic ovary syndrome).

And in Virginia, 15-year-old Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter is organizing demonstrations outside school board meetings to pressure the Fairfax County district to offer students information about reproductive health clinics, more detailed lessons on contraceptive methods other than abstinence (it already includes the basics, but she wants more) — and access to contraception.

“Teenagers are teenagers, and some teenagers are going to have sex,” she said. “They need to be educated on how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies and STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and sexual risk — especially if we’re removing the right to … choose whether or not you’re having a baby.”

Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia require that students receive sex education at school, according to a tracker maintained by the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Thirty states demand that schools emphasize the importance of abstinence, and 16 states mandate “abstinence-only” sex education.

What students actually learn in the classroom varies by district and even by teacher, said Laura Lindberg, a public health professor at Rutgers University who has studied sex education in the United States for three decades. But it is often “too little too late,” she said. Her research suggests that less than half of U.S. teens receive instruction on where to get birth control before having sex for the first time, and she noted that the teen birthrate in the United States — 16.7 births per 1,000 females in 2019 — is consistently among the highest in the developed world, though it has been declining in recent years.

In the Tennessee park, Emma Rose scrolled her thumb down her phone screen, squinting at the glare, to read off details of upcoming advocacy: An outdoor concert to raise money for pro-abortion groups. A protest at the Tennessee Capitol on the day the state’s abortion ban takes effect.

Then she shared how she and the group’s three co-founders, Alyson Nordstrom, Lily Swain and Paige Buckley, all 17, see the future.

“We want to start getting groups structured in different parts of Tennessee,” Emma Rose said. Each spin-off chapter would be located at a different high school throughout the state.

Then those teens, too, could start teaching each other.

‘Alone and ignorant’

In some parts of the country, teens teaching teens sex ed is not a new idea.

That includes Park City, Utah, where Carly McAleer started high school four years ago having received a sex education that “basically amounted to scaring students with really grotesque photos” of sexually transmitted infections. Utah law requires sex education in all schools but prohibits “the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices,” instead mandating that schools “stress the importance of abstinence.”

By sophomore year, Carly, who is now 18 and uses they/them pronouns, began searching for a way to become better informed — and discovered the Planned Parenthood Teen Council program. The initiative, begun in 1989 in Washington state, trains teens to teach other schoolchildren sex education, then partners with willing private schools, school districts or community groups to host peer-led lessons on topics ranging from consent to contraception, depending on state law and school policy. Since its founding, it has expanded to 15 states, and last year 300 teens volunteered on 31 councils, according to Nadya Santiago Schober of Planned Parenthood.

Carly applied, was accepted their junior year, and was soon walking into middle-school classrooms — feeling more than a bit nervous — to lead classes on STIs and healthy relationships. Carly found that most students, starved for information, were intensely curious.

And Carly came to love moments that demonstrated the difference they were making — for example when they asked students what kind of lubricant is okay to use with condoms, “the room went silent, and so I told them a silicone-based or water-based lubricant.”

The end of Roe appears to have driven more interest in the Teen Council program, which is poised to expand, Santiago Schober said: “We are seeing an increase in the size of our groups for the year ahead.” In Utah, said L-E Baldwin, a community health educator with that state’s Planned Parenthood chapter, “we have had interest from rural parts of the state in ways we have not previously.”

Lindberg, the Rutgers professor, said the upsurge in young people advocating for comprehensive sex education is admirable, if unsurprising in a generation known for its activism on climate change, gun control and reading freedom. She cautioned that it is important would-be student-teachers pick out correct information from the plethora of misinformation available online.

“Young people can now access information in places that a generation ago weren’t an option, whether that’s a YouTube video or a Tik Tok or something on Instagram,” she said. “But they have to be careful.”

And, she warned, anyone pushing for more sex education will face stiff opposition from mostly conservative parents and lawmakers who argue that it is inappropriate and will lead students to become promiscuous — despite a large body of research that shows providing sexual health information and services to students is not linked with increased sexual activity, and the fact that a majority of American adults across political lines support sex education in schools.

Since the 1980s, when sex education became widespread in America as a means to fight HIV infection, conservatives and the religious right have steadily chipped away at the availability of sex ed nationwide, Lindberg said. And they’re especially fired up now, post-Roe and amid raging education culture wars that have delivered new laws restricting what teachers can say about race, racism, sexuality, gender identity and LGBTQ issues. As Charles Herbster, an unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska, put it at a rally alongside former president Donald Trump in May: “We’re going to take sex education out of the schools and put it back in the homes where it belongs.” (Herbster did not answer requests for comment

An ascendant parents’ rights movement is also working to limit what students learn in school about sex — partly through measures that increase parental control over students’ in-class reading choices and outlaw sexually explicit texts. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the national parent group Moms for Liberty, said in an interview that “comprehensive sex ed has no place in school.” She said school districts everywhere should convene groups of parents to determine what is “age appropriate” for children to learn.

She had a message for students advocating around sex ed: “The teenagers are being pushed by activist organizations, whose purpose is making children politically literate rather than actually literate so they can become social justice warriors. That’s what the union is trying to do,” she said, referring to teachers organizations, which Justice said are pushing communist doctrine on America’s children.

In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who won his office by campaigning on education issues — this spring signed a law that requires school districts to notify parents whenever sexually explicit material is included in lessons, and to offer students non-explicit alternatives if parents request them.

Rivka, the Fairfax County teen, believes this law imperils students’ access to sex education. She is all the more determined to persuade her school district to expand its sex-ed curriculum by teaching about more contraceptive options and reproductive health clinics, as well as offering students free contraception. Her sex-ed experience was “abstinence 100” percent of the time, she said.

Fairfax sex ed comprises “an abstinence-based … curriculum, meaning that both abstinence and contraception are included in instruction,” district spokeswoman Julie Moult said in a statement. “Contraception is included in instruction in grades 8-12,” she added, pointing to teachings about “barrier, hormonal, and surgical contraceptive methods,” including condoms. Parents can remove their children from the program if they wish.

Moult said the district mentions Planned Parenthood as a resource for “students experiencing unintended pregnancy” in 10th grade. But she said “inclusion of reproductive health clinics could be considered” by school officials in the future.

Moult previously told The Washington Post that giving students access to contraception would be “outside the scope and purpose” of sex ed. The Fairfax County School Board this spring voted to delay a series of proposed changes that would have expanded the topics covered in sex ed and ended gender segregation in some classes, an idea Rivka supports.

“We have millions of men who don’t know how a period works,” Rivka said, recalling conversations with male friends who were clueless about things like tampons and pads. “Teens are just going out into these waters alone and ignorant.”

Teens wonder: Could we do better?

In Tennessee, Alyson Nordstrom had never so much as joined a march when Roe came under threat

But on May 3, feeling the angriest she had ever been, she tapped out an Instagram message to Emma Rose Smith, who had helped organize a 10,000-strong protest after the killing of George Floyd: “I don’t know if you saw the leaking of the Roe v Wade draft opinion from the Supreme Court but me and some of my friends [are] wanting to put together something in protest of that … I was wondering if you wanted to work together.”

Emma Rose responded: “I would love too!”

The girls each brought in their friends, Lily Swain and Paige Buckley, and Teens for Reproductive Rights was born — although they didn’t finalize the name until a coffee-shop confab, when they also created an Instagram profile. Their first event was a May 7 march in Nashville Public Square Park for abortion rights; their second, a music concert in late July that raised $5,000 for Abortion Care Tennessee.

At that point, the girls started to rethink what they might accomplish. The foursome had initially thought the group was “a one-time thing,” Lily said, “but then we started hanging out and getting to know each other.” Soon, their minds turned to sex education.

Alyson, who wants to become a lawyer, recalled the lessons she sat through: “It was just, like, ‘Don’t have sex,’ [and] the guys goofed off the whole time.” Emma Rose, who wants to major in English and political science, had similar memories: “In fifth grade, they just said your boobs might grow and you might get your period. … In ninth-grade, they showed pictures of STDs [and] said this is what you’re going to get if you have sex.” Paige remembered the teacher letting the boys go to the playground while the girls learned about periods. And Lily, an Irish history buff, said what stuck out most was that her sex-ed teachers clearly didn’t want to answer any questions.

That fits with Tennessee law, where sex education cannot include instruction that encourages students to engage in “non-abstinent behavior,” and teachers could face a $500 fine if they fail to comply.

The four teens began to wonder: Could we do better?

The two-hour picnic on a superhot Saturday afternoon this month attended by about 30 students — mostly girls but a handful of boys, too — was a trial run. The girls spoke briefly about issues they want to cover more later, including the implications of new state antiabortion laws. But a lot of the conversation was loose, just teens talking.

“It’s like you’re going back in time,” one girl said of Roe’s end.

“I think my concern is bringing more kids into this world,” said another. “The foster-care system is terrible.”

A boy recounted a recent chat with his devoutly Christian mother and shared advice for approaching antiabortion family members: “It can be scary. But it’s definitely worth talking with people about.”

Much of the afternoon had the vibe of a hangout, with boxes of pizza and gentle music. The teens played games of Ninja and Zap. A boy who rode up on a bike, training for his high school cycling team, offered to wear a Teens for Reproductive Rights sticker on his racing helmet.

As the clock inched to 5 p.m., Alyson sought everyone’s attention one more time. She had homework to assign.

“There’s a documentary on Netflix,” she said, raising her voice. “It’s called ‘Reversing Roe.’ It talks about, literally from early 1900s to recent — I think it came out right before the actual reversing.” She added that the film traces how abortion “became politicized, which it wasn’t originally at all.”

Teens sprawled on blankets bent their heads over phones and pamphlets to take down the name.

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Some pundits say that talking with little kids about sex and gender primes them to be taken advantage of. Sex-ed researchers say that the opposite is true.

By Olga Khazan

If you ask some (okay, many) conservative pundits, Democrats are “grooming” children. As in, grooming them to be abused by pedophiles. Some Republicans have even accused Democrats of being pedophiles themselves.

The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual orientations. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that discourages teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. Referring to the bill, DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” A pastor even organized an “anti-grooming” rally at Disney’s headquarters in California.

This type of rhetoric is damaging in its own right. As the commentator David French writes in his newsletter, “Throwing around accusations of pedophilia, sympathy for pedophilia, grooming, or sympathy for grooming is a recipe for threats and violence”—an assessment that some historians endorse. This latest pedophilia panic overlaps with the false beliefs of the QAnon movement, which fueled the Pizzagate incident in 2016.

But bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects. Comprehensive sex ed doesn’t just help prevent bullying; it helps kids have healthier relationships of all kinds, improves their communication skills, and even boosts their media literacy. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates. One meta-analysis found that European countries, many of which offer comprehensive, mandatory sex ed, including for young children, tend to have the lowest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. “Sex education, even when started in the earliest grades, has shown to be protective for kids, especially around child sexual abuse.”

A 2020 study that examined three decades of research on sex education found that comprehensive sex ed that begins in elementary school can help prevent child sex abuse, among other benefits. “Stranger danger”–type language isn’t recommended these days; about 93 percent of child sexual-abuse victims know their abusers. Instead, these programs help children identify the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, the difference between “tattling” and keeping unsafe secrets, and how to identify abusive situations. In other words, sex ed isn’t grooming—it helps protect kids from grooming.

Modern sex ed also seems to give kids a sense of empowerment, including by teaching them the correct names for their own genitals. “Predators are less likely to select a child who can accurately talk about those body parts,” Gelperin says, “than a child that is ignorant of what those body parts are actually called.” It also makes kids less likely to victimize one another: One program for eighth graders, called Safe Dates, was associated with lower rates of physical and sexual dating violence four years later, compared with a control group.

Experts recommend starting sex education as early as kindergarten and teaching it the way you would math. Five-year-olds don’t tend to learn geometry, but they do learn about numbers and shapes. Similarly, experts say kindergartners don’t need to be told about, for example, orgasms, but they are encouraged to understand what their body parts are and how to protect themselves from unwanted touching.

One of the best-regarded American sex-ed curricula is “Rights, Respect, and Responsibility,” or the “3Rs,” developed by Advocates for Youth and available for free online. For kindergartners and first graders, the lessons focus on preventing bullying, setting boundaries about touching, and learning what types of things make babies (elephants, but not pizza). The most explicit section covers the proper names of genitalia, including an explanation that most girls have a “hole” called “the vagina that is used when a female has a baby.” The use of correct anatomical terms is meant to ensure that kids are understood if they ever report abuse. But also, “this is your body and you have a right to know what the different parts are called,” the curriculum explains.

The first-grade lesson plans also include a section about gender identity, in which teachers are encouraged to say something like “You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts. And you might not feel like you’re a boy or a girl, but you’re a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you’re perfectly normal!”

Though this message does not exactly comport with a socially conservative worldview, it hardly amounts to “grooming” children to be molested by pedophiles. The argument for providing information on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary school is that children are likely to encounter these concepts in the wild. Between 2 million and 4 million American children are being raised by a non-straight parent. Some children might either be transgender themselves or have a parent who is. Advocates of this type of curriculum say these concepts can be explained more accurately in school, and help make kids who are not straight or cisgender feel welcomed.

But just because the “3Rs” curriculum is recommended doesn’t mean it gets taught. Far from it: Sex ed, like all lesson plans, varies dramatically by school district, and usually reflects the values of the surrounding community. For example, Texas, which has more children than almost any other state, does not require high schools to teach sex ed. As of 2017, most Texas schools districts took an abstinence-only approach to sex ed, and though the state has recently introduced some discussion of contraceptives in middle school, abstinence must be emphasized. Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is not currently offered in Florida from kindergarten to third grade, the ages targeted by the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Most European countries do provide comprehensive sex ed in every school, however. Experts link Europeans’ superior sexual-health outcomes—lower teen pregnancy rates, lower rates of sexual abuse, and lower STD rates among young people—to better, earlier sex ed. In Western Europe, sex ed tends to be mandatory and blunt, and start before kindergarten; it’s like the “3Rs,” but more graphic.

In the Netherlands, sex ed begins before many kids can read. “From age 5, children are taught about reproduction, about pregnancy and birth of a baby,” says Elsbeth Reitzema, the sexuality-education program officer at Rutgers, a Dutch nonprofit that helps run the country’s sex-ed programs. “They also learn the main physical differences between boys and girls, about the genitals and their functions. By the end of primary school, children have learned about reproduction, pregnancy, and birth. They know that a woman, if she is fertile, can become pregnant through sex in the manner of penis-in-vagina sex.” They also learn about being intersex, transgender, and nonbinary. When they’re 11, kids learn about masturbation.

One popular Dutch sex-ed curriculum explains to fourth graders that “the clitoris is a very sensitive place. Touching it can give a nice feeling,” according to Beyond Birds and Bees, a 2018 book in part about the Dutch approach to sex ed by Bonnie Rough, who has written on the same topic for The Atlantic. “It is not customary for parents to take their children out of the lesson,” Reitzema told me. “Should parents object to the lessons, then the school will explain what the content of the lessons is. This usually removes the parents’ resistance to the lessons.”

In Sweden’s mandatory sex-ed program, 7-to-9-year-olds learn “about all body parts, and discuss gender,” Hans Olsson, the country’s senior adviser on sexuality education, told me. “School has a duty to counteract limiting gender patterns, already at [the] preschool level.” Also in preschool, kids learn about bodily integrity and name their sexual organs. Rather than the proper terminology, though, Swedish kids use snopp, which is like “willy,” and snippa. (“Don’t know the equivalent word in English,” Olsson said.) Starting in fourth grade, Swedish kids learn about LGBTQ issues.

Sara Zaske, the author of the German comparative-parenting book Achtung Baby, told me that her 7-year-old daughter’s class in Berlin read the children’s book Mummy Laid an Egg without asking parents’ permission first. The picture book, which was originally published in English, features cartoon drawings of “Daddy’s tube” and “Mummy’s hole,” along with the ways “mummies and daddies fit together.” Unlike in the United States, Zaske writes in her book, “German kids learn much more about sex than conception.” German schools cover STD prevention, yes, but also masturbation, orgasms, and homosexuality. Zaske quotes one doctor in an article on the city of Berlin’s official website as saying, “Sex education cannot begin early enough.”

Rough and others don’t see these types of lessons as “giving children ideas” about sex and sexuality. After all, adults openly do things—drink alcohol, use the stove, drive—that kids can’t. Kids understand when an activity is for adults only. She and other advocates reject the notion that telling kids about different sexual orientations or gender identities “turns” kids gay or gender-nonconforming. “Teaching about the topics is not creating new LGBTQ students,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, a sexuality educator and co-author of the “3Rs” curriculum.

But most important, early sex ed opens up lines of communication between kids and responsible adults. “If we start giving off the impression that sex is a topic that when you ask me a question … that I’m going to start acting weird and funny and dishonest about it, they quickly pick up that this is something off-limits,” says Emily Rothman, a health-sciences professor at Boston University. “So they’re either gonna think, Well, I can go to my friends or I can go to the internet.” By which she means: to porn.

The larger point of this kind of instruction is what the Dutch call “sexual assertiveness”: “If somebody is saying or doing something that makes your body feel uncomfortable, you’ve been taught how to notice that and what to do next,” Rough told me. One aim of communicating freely about sex with a teacher or another trusted adult is the “development of a trusting, trustworthy relationship with a grown-up who has the child’s best interests at heart.”

Meanwhile, only a quarter of U.S. public schools report that students practice communication, decision making, goal setting, or refusal skills as part of sex ed, Rough writes in her book. Instead, some American children learn about sex through porn, through experimentation, or, tragically, from an abuser. Because so much of American sex education treats sexual activity as dangerous or shameful, kids who are victimized by adults may feel that they have to keep it secret. European children who learn about their body, and are warned about inappropriate touching, can better protect themselves. There, Rough writes, “those who prey on children can no longer benefit from their ignorance.”

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