Sex.

There it is.

Get all the giggling out now because we have some grown up stuff to talk about.

I had occasion to consider the issue of sex and teens when I read the story about local anti-abortion activist Terry Palmquist being upset that someone at the Democrats’ booth at the Kern County Fair allegedly gave a condom to her teenage son.

There was much hoopla over whether this was an appropriate thing to hand out at a “family” event, but that’s not what interested me.

I wondered where our numbers stood.

We used to be No. 1 in the state for teen births and pretty high for sexually transmitted diseases among teens as well. (Not exactly the image civic boosters had in mind with “Bakersfield: Life as it should be.”)

These days teen birth rates are way down, following national and statewide trends.
Locally, we’ve gone from 101.5 births per 1,000 population to girls aged 15 to 19 in 1990; to 61 births per 1,000 population to girls age 15 to 19 in 2005. (Which still makes us the No. 3 county in the state for teen births.)


There’s no way to track abortions, so it’s hard to know for sure whether fewer teens are getting pregnant or more are terminating their pregnancies. Considering the trend is so widespread, though, it’s likely that fewer girls are getting pregnant.

That is great news.

But sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are high, and troublingly so.

In fact, we’re No. 2 and No. 3 in the state, respectively, for rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea.

The 15- to 24-year-old set was responsible for 68 percent of Kern’s reported chlamydia cases and 56 percent of reported gonorrhea cases, according to a state report in July 2006.

Chlamydia cases in girls 15 to 19 per 100,000 population have gone from 2,156 in 1995 to 2,998 in 2006, according to Kirt Emery, assistant director of disease control at the Kern County Public Health Department. For boys, the rate during that time has gone from 216.7 to 733.9 per 100,000 population. Gonorrhea cases have remained steady.

That is not great news.

There have been advances in testing for chlamydia that could account for some of the increase, but Emery told me that’s not enough to explain the overall increase.

All of which tells me a couple of things about Kern’s teens: A) they are having sex and B) it’s unprotected.

I’m not sure why they’re not getting pregnant in greater numbers (I probably don’t want to know) but it’s clear we have a problem.

When you throw in other STDs, deadly ones like HIV/AIDS, potentially deadly ones like HPV and incurable ones like herpes, it’s pretty scary out there.

And while I don’t think tossing condoms at teens from a fair booth will help, I wondered if we’re giving them enough information so they can truly protect themselves against their own hormonal inclinations and the overwhelming pop culture drumbeat of sex, sex, sex?

Actually, here in Kern County, we’re giving it a pretty good shot.

In the Kern High School District, Ron Valenti has run the HIV/AIDS Education Program, a model in the state, for the 15 years it’s been in existence.

It gets more than $450,000 each year in state funding and reaches about 9,700 of KHSD’s 37,000 students when they’re freshmen. It’s an intensive five-day program that stresses abstinence and parent involvement and also gives the pros and cons of various protection methods. More importantly, it gives kids real, unvarnished information about what HIV can do to you.

They also talk to the kids about dealing with sexual pressure. Evals from students on this angle were particularly enlightening.

“It made me not want to force a girl to have sex.”

Yeah, I’m hoping most guys feel this way — with or without this class!

From the gals:

“Now when a guy comes up and pressures me, I’ll have a back-up plan.”

“It taught me how to say ‘No.’”

“I’m not going to let a guy rush me into having sex.”

Good. Because if you’re too embarrassed to look your partner in the eye and say, “Here, put this on,” you should not be having sex.

Clinica Sierra Vista has a more general sex ed program for younger teens — 7th graders. It also stresses abstinence and goes over the facts of puberty, diseases, pregnancy and contraceptives.

“Our main focus is abstinence,” said Barbara Gladden an administrative coordinator for the program. “We try to get them to see their behaviors have consequences.”

As good as these courses may be, however, they can’t do as much as parents.

“We have them for five days,” Valenti said. “Their parents have had them for 13 years.”

An interesting twist on Valenti’s course in KHSD is that students are requred to talk about what they learn each day with their parents as homework. Unfortunately, many students don’t complete that assignment because for whatever reason, they’re not talking to their parents about this. In fact, Valenti said, the evalutions show students who rate the course poorly also don’t talk with their parents about sex. The correlation is stunning, he said.

If parents aren’t talking and kids aren’t listening, I don’t know what else we can do.

Maybe pelting them with condoms at the fair is a sign of how desperate we are.

Lois Henry’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com
/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, e-mail her at lhenry@bakersfield.com or call her at 395-7373.