Sarah Palin, Bristol, and sex education

Earlier, I talked about how some people unfairly criticize Sarah Palin, laying the blame for Bristol's pregnancy firmly at her feet. Without defending (or even evaluating) Governor Palin's suitability as a candidate, I opined that such criticisms are patently unfair. I'd even argue that these are kinda cheap shots. Obama himself appears to agree, which is why he has asked his supporters to lay off.

Nevertheless, I've seen a great many critics jump on Sarah Palin's case over this issue. Apart from questioning her parenting skills, they also say, "Aha! This demonstrates that her abstinence-only beliefs on sex education simply don't work." Now, I'm not going to attack or defend the use of abstinence-based (or even abstinence-only) sex education, as that would merit a whole 'nuther long discussion. Rather, I want to emphasize that this line of reasoning is unwarranted, and here's why.

First, nobody should rationally expect that any approach to sex education will be foolproof. That's simply naive. If somebody gets pregnant despite extensive instruction on the use of condoms and IUDs, would people be so quick to conclude that this method of teaching is a disaster? Probably not.

Besides which, even if we were to pretend that a single failure constitutes proof that a particular approach doesn't work, we still can't use Bristol Palin as a valid datapoint. Why? Because we don't know that she was educated using "abstinence only" as a guiding principle. All we know is that this is what her mother advocates. We don't know if this is what Bristol was taught in the schools, for example. We don't even know if this is what her father advocates. Heck, we don't even know when Sarah Palin herself adopted this stance (which, for all we know, could have been well into Bristol's teen years).

Now, this is the point at which various peopl exclaim, "But abstinence teaching doesn't work! Those programs are stupid!" Maybe that's true, and maybe not... but that's not the issue at hand. The question is whether the blame for Bristol's unfortunate situation should be placed on Sarah Palin's views on sexuality or her parenting skills. Such accusations are simply unwarranted, and they implicitly assume that anything less than 100% effectivenesss is equivalent to abject failure.