One Saturday morning in early February, three-dozen activists gathered in the second- story offices of Planned Parenthood’s health clinic in downtown Raleigh.

The dimly lit room contained a cross-section of people — a few high school students, one or two retired couples, and several young adults in their mid-20s, most wearing pink shirts, buttons, and bandanas. A handful of children sat in the corner, using markers and colored paper to create signs bearing slogans such as “Be Real — Sex Ed Saves Lives” and “Protect Your Kids — Vote For Sex Ed.”

“Our message is very much a part of today’s march,” Paige Johnson, a Planned Parenthood employee, told the group. “We want funding for real sex education that works, and not just abstinence-only that your government has spent $1 billion on over the last decade.”

Fifteen minutes later, the group left the clinic and walked to Chavis Park to participate in the second annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street march, sponsored by the N.C. chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Planned Parenthood activists had a goal in mind — persuade elected officials to scuttle North Carolina’s law requiring schools to teach abstinence-until-marriage and replace it with one mandating comprehensive sex education.

But not everyone agrees with that agenda. Supporters of the current abstinence law say sex education reform, supported by groups such as Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion-provider, would harm children and curb parental rights and local control.

Abstinence standard

Statutory law requires N.C. public schools to teach “that abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage is the expected standard for all school age children.” The mandate is funded through the federal government’s Title V program, which allocates $50 million a year nationwide for abstinence instruction in public schools. North Carolina receives about $1.2 million, in addition to matching funds from the state.

Mike Long, an abstinence educator who helped draft the state’s original abstinence education law in 1995, defined abstinence-until-marriage programs as a “holistic approach to human sexuality.”

“It not only deals with the physical, but with the mental, emotional, moral, and social dimensions,” he said. “Comprehensive sex education comes from the vantage that sex is just a physical thing. They teach teens that they are nothing more than sexual beings. That’s not true. We are human beings.”

Under the current abstinence-until-marriage law, local school districts can opt out of the abstinence standard and substitute comprehensive sex education, which teaches students about atypical sexual behaviors, such as homosexuality and bisexuality; abortion; and how to buy condoms and birth-control pills.

To opt out, school districts must conduct public hearings and offer parents 60 days to review the curriculum and give feedback. Fewer than one in 10 school districts have chosen this option.

The exemption, however, does not go far enough for comprehensive-sex-education advocates, who say that abstinence-until-marriage is medically inaccurate and puts teens’ lives at risk.

“For us, we’ve always believed that young people deserve comprehensive information,” said Johnson, vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina. “The message really ought to be to delay sex until they are ready to deal with the emotional consequences, but also prepare kids for when they decide to have sex.”

During the 2007 session of the General Assembly, Rep. Susan Fisher, D-Buncombe, and Sen. Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth, introduced legislation to require all school districts to teach comprehensive sex education, with no exception for school districts that wish to continue using the current curriculum.

The measures died in committee, but comprehensive-sex-education advocates have vowed to reintroduce similar bills in future sessions. Supporters also recently launched a campaign to persuade Gov. Mike Easley to reject the Title V funds, which would essentially end abstinence programs in North Carolina.

Fiscal impact

Under the current framework, state taxpayers have to match three-fourths of every dollar in Title V funding from the federal government. It’s not apparent, however, what kind of tax burden the state would shoulder if a comprehensive program were substituted. Neither sex education measure introduced last session included a fiscal impact statement.

Nationally, spending on comprehensive sex education far outstrips abstinence-until-marriage funding. In 2002, the federal government spent an estimated $1.6 billion on contraception promotion and pregnancy prevention programs, while abstinence received about $119 million, according to a Republican congressional study committee.

Local, parental control

A law mandating more explicit sex education would breach school board authority and parental rights, said Tami Fitzgerald, a lawyer with the North Carolina Family Policy Council, a conservative nonprofit that lobbied against the sex education bills last session.

“If the state takes away parents’ authority to determine the manner in which their children are taught about sex, then the state has breached its duty, because it has taken the place of the parent,” Fitzgerald said.

Long said he has gotten feedback from school administrators angry over the possibility of Raleigh mandating what kind of sex education is taught.

“We’re real believers in local control,” he said. “Why is this bill even necessary when state law allows local school districts to teach this very thing?”

While Johnson said she understands concerns over local control, she objected to the public hearing process necessary to approve new curriculum, saying that opponents bus people in to protest school board members who support comprehensive sex education.

“They make it loud, intimidating, very shrill,” she said. “School boards don’t want to take it on over fear of backlash.”

She said Fisher’s bill might have been stronger if it had contained an opt-out exemption like the current law does.

On parental involvement, Johnson said that a core part of every comprehensive sex education curriculum is parent-teen communication, but Long said that supporters of contraception-based sex education don’t want parents engaged with children.

“The philosophical difference is that they want to provide contraception all the way down to sixth grade, they want to avoid parental consent, and then if that doesn’t work for you, just come back to us and get an abortion referral,” Long said.

David N. Bass in an associate editor of Carolina Journal.