Transcript
SESSIONS:
Morning Discussion
Lunch Keynote
Afternoon Session
E.J. DIONNE: It's a great honor to introduce Isabel Sawhill. I first met her when I was a young reporter. I was about 22 or 23 years old, and there wasn't a policy area I was interested in at the time that Isabel Sawhill hadn't done some work on. It seems like she knows everything. So I could introduce her by saying that between us, we know everything; she knows everything, and I know all the rest.
Isabel Sawhill has a distinguished career, both as a scholar and as a public servant. She is a Senior Fellow here at Brookings and the first occupant of the Adeline and Alfred Johnson Chair. Prior to joining Brookings, she was a Senior Fellow occupying the R.J. Miller Chair at the Urban Institute. Belle was Associate Director at the Office of Management and Budget, which means she always asks what things costs. Her responsibility included all of the human resource programs of the federal government. Before joining the Clinton Administration, she directed several large research projects at the Urban Institute, and she is the author of a great many books. She is also, relevant to today, the President of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. I got the name right this time.
Belle, it's an honor to introduce you. Thanks for being with us.
(Applause.)
MS. SAWHILL: Thank you very much, E.J.. It's wonderful to get a chance today to wear both of my hats, instead of feeling totally schizophrenic, because I do serve as part-time President of the National Campaign, and also as a Senior Fellow here at Brookings. This meeting has brought both of my lives together and joined them at the hip, so it's just a wonderful day for me.
I thought the conversation and the presentations this morning were absolutely marvelous, and I'm not sure what I can add to all of this. I sat there this morning, and I had made a little outline of some questions that I wanted to raise, and I was furiously scribbling down what some of you were saying about some potential answers to those questions. So I'm going to struggle through these rather discombobulated notes, and I hope you'll bear with me.
I want to say, by the way, that there are a lot of people here who are associated with the Campaign. The Campaign is very much a team effort, and we have several members of our Board here that you heard from this morning, Bill Galston and Sister Mary Rose McGeady, and Doug Kirby, who is also a member of our Board, as well as the Chair of our Research Task Force. We also had several people here from our other task forces, Pat Ware, Pat Fagan, and I'm probably missing someone. There has been a wonderful overlap between our two institutions.
Anyway, in struggling with the issue that I think E.J. wants us to address — and I really want to than him again for bringing us all together — it seemed to me that there are sort of six questions that we needed to be asking ourselves about faith-based approaches to teenage pregnancy prevention:
The first one is, to what extent does our interest in teen pregnancy prevention turn on moral and ethical issues?
Second, what is the role of faith-based institutions in resolving the moral dilemmas that exist?
Third, how should we think about the role of faith-based institutions in a specifically American context?
Fourth, how do we deal with the conflict that the different views we all hold is likely to engender? That's a very important topic.
And, fifth, what are we talking about doing, if anything, on Monday morning? What's the action plan here? Where does all this take us?
And, sixth, in deference to Doug Kirby and the rest of the social science community, how will we know what difference it will make?
Question 1: to what extent this turns on moral questions. I think that Sister Mary Rose really hit the nail on the head when she said people come to this issue with very different motivations and for very different reasons. Often they can make common ground on an action plan even when they don't totally weight the reasons for their concerns the same way.
If I had to simplify, I'd say there are two major camps here: the moralists and the consequentialists. The consequentialists are the people who are mostly worried about sexually activity amongst teens because it leads to pregnancy or to disease or poor health. But there are also a group of people who, even if there were no adverse consequences, would still be concerned about the fact that sex was going on outside of marriage, and particularly amongst very young individuals.
I sometimes ask people to go through a thought experiment in which you assume there is a perfect contraceptive, one that is in no way dependent upon human motivation or human self-discipline. And, therefore, because we have a perfect contraceptive, there are no adverse consequences — there is no HIV, there is no AIDS, there is no pregnancy; there is just sex. How would that change your view of this issue? Would you be comfortable with your 13- or 14-year old son or daughter being sexually active under those circumstances, or would you not be? How would you feel about sex outside of marriage? Would you feel differently than you do now? Would you think sex could be an extracurricular activity like basketball in the schools? How would you view rape? Would you knock it down from a felony to a misdemeanor?
I think in the process of trying to answer questions like that, we can sort out the extent to which we are concerned about this problem because of its consequences, and the extend to which we're concerned about it for other reasons.
We aren't yet in the world of having a perfect contraceptive. Contraceptive failure rates are not insignificant, as Doug reminded us in his paper. So even if you are a consequentialist, you can believe that abstinence is a good thing. You don't even have to moralize about it; you can simply say it is the best way to prevent the adverse consequences.
I want to remind you that even amongst adults, condom failure rates are, as best we can tell, about 12 percent a year. If you became sexually active on your 16th birthday, and you had four years of sexually activity, and you multiply four times 12, there's about a 50/50 chance that you're going to get pregnant before you reach age 20. This is why I think many of us who are even just concerned about consequences believe that we have to be delivering a message of abstinence as well as a message of safer sex.
Another reason that comes home is because if you look at the past trends or history in this area, we know there is much greater use of contraceptives now than there was back in 1970, and yet the teenage pregnancy rate, up until about 1990, didn't fall as a result of that. Well, why didn't it fall? The reason it didn't fall is because at the same time that sexually active teens were using contraceptives more often and more consistently than they had previously, there were also a lot more teenagers at risk because a lot more of them were becoming sexually active.
So, one way I put this is that in the battle between sex and safe sex — up until about 1990, anyway — sex won. If we hadn't had contraceptives, it would have been much, much worse.
More recently there is, as most of you know, some good news. Teen pregnancy and teen birth rates have been coming down, and that seems to be due to two reasons: contraceptive use is up and sexual activity is down. If we ask why sexual activity is down, there does seem to have been some shift in attitudes. I have some various pieces of data on that that I would be happy to share with any of you.
I think that it's possible that faith-based communities have had a role in shaping these social norms and this shift in attitude. You know, Joyce Ladner reminded us this morning about how much social norms and attitudes have shifted since 30 years or so ago. And I looked up the Gallup Polls on this, and in 1969, 68 percent of the American public agreed with the statement, "premarital sex is wrong." By 1985, that had fallen to 39 percent, and in 1996, it was going up again and it's back up to 43 percent — very interesting.
My conclusion here is that values matter, they matter both at the micro level — meaning they can influence individual behavior (and I'm sure you'll hear a lot more from Pat Fagan about that this afternoon) — and they matter at the macro level — meaning that they affect how the larger culture views these issues and these behaviors.
Question 2: what is the role of faith-based institutions? Put differently, if solutions to this problem are at least partly based in ethical and moral principles, which institutions should we look to for some answers? It seems to me that there are basically three teaching institutions in our society: The first are families, the second are churches, and the third are schools. Now, public schools, because they are open to all, must teach what I would call, for want of a better word, a lowest common denominator curriculum. In fact, sex education in the schools, as desirable as it is, is often mostly about reproductive biology, about body parts, and much less about values and relationships.
Churches, because they consist of people who share certain moral values, can be more specific about such matters, about the context for relationships. And families, because they dispense values on the most retail level of all, can be even more prescriptive. Most families, of course, don't exist in isolation; they tend to band together in congregations that are often defined by a shared set of religious or other beliefs.
So, in short, faith-based approaches are appealing because they address some of these moral and ethical dimensions, and, as several of you said today, they deal with the whole person; they don't deal just with the medical aspects or some other piece of the problem. And they can do this in an environment — to use Bill Galston's words, which I love — of care, connection, and community.
Each faith community is going to do this in their own distinctive way. When the National Campaign produced its Nine Tips for Faith Leaders, we didn't say, here's a particular curriculum or program that you should adopt in your church or synagogue or mosque. We emphasized, instead, the need for different denominations or different faiths to arm teenagers with a sense of belonging and a framework of values drawn from that faith's particular understanding of sex, love, and marriage and the relationships amongst them. The idea, as Bill said, was to ask each faith community to tend to its own garden, not to worry about what was planted in someone else's garden. The task for each faith community is to define when and under what circumstances, sexual expression is appropriate and when and under what circumstances it is not.
Question 3: How do we think about this in a specifically American context? I think faith-based solutions are particularly appealing in the United States because of our very high level of religious engagement in this country, combined with a tradition of religious tolerance. These are both, I think, distinctively American characteristics. E.J. Dionne, along with John DiIllio, edited a recent issue of the Brookings Review, which I commend to you. It's called "What's God Got to do with the American Experiment?" And in it there is polling data, and that polling data shows very interesting, somewhat paradoxical things:
One is that, relative to 30 years ago, the public is much more concerned about moral failings of the population, particularly the youth population. The question that is asked, by the way, is, do you think youth today have fewer moral anchors than they did 30 years ago? It adjusts to the fact that the older generation is always going to think this about its youth population. They did back then, and they do now, but by comparing the two points in time, there is a real shift in that.
But at the same time, these polls equally show very strongly that tolerance is very alive and well in the United States; that whatever moral failings people perceive around them, they are very tolerant of other individuals' right to live by their own likes. I think that we struggled with that this morning when we said we need to find a way to bring judgments to bear without doing so in a self-righteous or moralizing manner. Religious leaders have played an important role in American society historically, and I think they can again in this area as well. As Bill Galston again put it, faith communities are at the heart of civil society in the United States.
Question 4: What do we do about conflict? As we all rediscovered one more time this morning, advocates of different approaches argue incessantly about their particular favored approach. Some want to focus on abstinence until marriage; others will argue that the horse is already out of the barn and that it is far more urgent and realistic and compassionate to provide teens with the information that they need to protect themselves against pregnancy and disease.
I thought Pat Ware articulated particularly well the way in which this issue is seen from the perspective of the groups that she works with, and reminded us that no matter how many times the Doug Kirbys of the world tell us that providing contraception to teenagers hasn't been found to increase rates of sexual activity, people who believe that sex outside of marriage is wrong do not want to send a different moral message.
On the other hand, we had Reverend Buehrens telling us that the self-righteousness that has grown up in some faith traditions around this is really harming our youth. Social scientists come into this battle with statistics and studies that appear to support one view or the other. Some people without particularly strong views may be swayed by such studies, and I'm all for them and I totally commend Doug Kirby for the enormous contribution he has made to the country in this area. But I also want to remind us that people's views go deeper than that, and many of them are going to reject these studies long before they change their views.
So, conflict is a problem, but I think what we're beginning to understand is that we need not convert others to our own view in order to achieve the goal of reducing teen pregnancy. Yes, it would be simpler if we could agree on what to teach our children, and probably a little less confusing to them as well, but it is simply not true that only one approach will work. Abstinence until marriage clearly works to prevent teen pregnancy if you can convince people to adopt it. Contraceptives also clearly work to prevent teen pregnancy if you can convince people to use them carefully and consistently. And many different combinations of these two approaches can work as well, including delaying sexual activity until one is through high school, and practicing safe sex thereafter, just to take one of many examples. I think what we at the Campaign have been impressed with is that there has been a false dichotomy set up between these two views. It doesn't have to be either/or. Both approaches are effective and appropriate in different circumstances.
The other thing I liked about this morning's conversation is that several people reminded us that there is even confusion about what we mean when we label a program abstinence-based, and we label another program abstinence-only. Some of these programs should be viewed as being much more on some kind of a continuum, rather than falling into some polarized dichotomy that then gets the argument started again.
Now, because polarization is a problem in many communities, as well as at the national level, our Campaign has begun to work with local communities where disagreements about the best approach have paralyzed them from doing much of anything. In fact, the problem is so severe in some places that we have a favorite saying at the Campaign, which is that while the adults are arguing, the teens are getting pregnant. We need to get beyond our arguments and do things that can actually help the young people themselves. We have discovered that when we work through these disagreements at the local level by bringing everybody to the table, and having a frank and open and respectful discussion about these issues, that we can make progress.
Bill Galston's task force has done that in microcosm for the country as a whole. It's an enormously diverse group and they spent two years, as he told you this morning, working through some of their own disagreements, and they approached this in a spirit which was positive and oriented towards making some positive changes here.
I would also add that my reading of the evidence is that there is much more common ground amongst the public at large than there is among the national leaders and political groups that talk about this issue. When we do polling of the American public, those polls show that the overwhelming majority of both adults and teenagers are in favor of having a standard of abstinence for school-aged youth, but they also want, by a great majority, to have contraceptives available, to have birth control and family planning clinics available to kids who need them. They're saying, on the one hand, we should articulate a standard that it's better to delay sex, but we should also have this safety net available.
Fifth Question: What do we do next? This is where I have the greatest problem; we are still struggling, particularly in terms of faith-based communities, and this may reflect my own lack of knowledge of what many faith communities are already doing. But I think one of the things we need to do is to challenge faith leaders to take a more active role in this area. That's something that the Campaign tried to do when we put out our Nine Tips for Faith Communities. We need to disseminate that information more broadly. We have done that so far through the Salvation Army, through the Religious Coalition that you heard about this morning, and even through the Catholic Church. Sister Mary Rose McGeady gave a keynote address to the Catholic Bishops on the need for them to be more involved, and Cardinal Keeler sent out our Tips with a letter bearing his signature, in which he explained that this publication came from a group, not every member of which agreed with the Catholic Church's position on this, but, and I quote, he said, "it has much in it that is good."
(Laughter.)
So, we can model the process of conflict reduction in everything that we do, and the need to be respectful of others' views and values.
Finally, I think we do need resources for church-based programs. Once we start talking about resources, we're going to get into all of the issues of church/state separation, issues that have been raised in the kinds of charitable choice provisions, and welfare reform. But without resources, faith-based solutions can only go so far; if you want to really involve the whole youth, if you really want to have youth ministries, if you really want to have mentoring programs, and recreation and youth fellowship, it's going to take more than just putting together a curriculum and mailing it out.
I loved the idea this morning about reaching people when they're still in seminary, but I think we have to think harder about exactly where the action steps are here. Julia Lear said this morning that a school-based clinic is not a program, but a place where an intervention can occur. In a similar way, a church or another faith organization is a place where an intervention can occur, and not a program in and of itself.
How much difference will any of this make? We don't know; we clearly don't know. We proceed in this direction more on faith than because we have any hard evidence that it will make a big difference. I think many of us believe it will, but we will have a hard time ever saying whether it does or not. This is not the kind of work that is terribly amenable to kind of scientific approach that I or Doug Kirby or other researchers might like. We can't, after all, randomly assign people to a group that believes in God and a group that does not. So, even if there is an association between religious belief or church attendance and abstaining from sex or other outcomes that we might prefer, I'm not sure what the policy or action implications of that association are.
I doubt that a new slogan proclaiming that "Kids who pray together will abstain together," "Take your child to Sunday School," is going to be terribly effective.
I leave you with those thoughts, and thank you for asking me to be with you today.
(Applause.)
DIONNE: Thank you, Belle. Belle has agreed to take questions. We've got some time, and then we'll adjourn and move back into the other room. Please, Belle, I'll just turn it over to you.
QUESTION: (Inaudible).
MS. SAWHILL: Yes, thank you for that correction. I shouldn't have implied that you were anti-research. I just meant that values would always be important, as well as what the research said.
I hope I didn't leave the impression that I don't think what the public schools are doing is important and potentially extremely important, and that we don't need sex education in the schools. I was really just trying to say that a school can't run the kind of program that a church can, for obvious reasons.
But, you know, I mean, one of the things that I hope you or Debra Haffner or someone who is here will address, because I'm not up to speed on this, is the state of sex education. We didn't talk about it enough this morning, but one of the places where these disagreements really do have an impact is when a conservative group in a local community gets in a position to influence what's going on in the schools, and they then impose on the school system either no sex education or a very restrictive program of some sort. I think we need to talk more about that.
QUESTION: (Inaudible).
MS. SAWHILL: As we said this morning, words are important, and my choice of lowest common denominator might have been unfortunate, but I do want to stick to my basic point here, which is that in a society that is as pluralistic as ours, it's going to be very hard to talk in as specific a moral context about these issues in the public schools as it is going to be in some other settings.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do both; it just means that there is a difference. I think it's unrealistic to assume that somehow or other we're going to achieve enough agreement about this that we can have a one-curriculum-fits-all approach in this area.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
MS. SAWHILL: That's a very good point — The National Campaign has argued that the national government or state government should not be dictating how this money should be used. We are giving an award in a few weeks now to the State of South Carolina, and we're giving the award to a public/private coalition in that state. The reason we're giving them an award is because the state legislature appropriated money for teen pregnancy prevention that goes to every local community in the state, with no strings attached. And also the public and the private sector worked closely together on that. That, we think, is a model for government effort for the future, and that's why we're honoring them. So that's a good point.
QUESTION: (Inaudible).
MS. SAWHILL: I want to remind everybody of one of the things E.J. said right at the beginning this morning — just because we're here talking about faith-based solutions to some social problems doesn't mean that a lot of us believe that government doesn't have a role to play as well. I think these are complementary approaches, rather than one being a substitute for the other.
I thank you all very much.
(Applause.)