Advocates Recommend Policies To Improve Sex Ed, Reduce Teen Pregnancy In Arkansas

This article was originally published in Arkansas Advocate.

Arkansas needs a more robust sexual health education landscape in order to reduce the state’s high rates of teenage pregnancy and births, a coalition of advocates for children’s health and wellbeing asserted in a report published Wednesday.

The report from Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families includes several policy recommendations to “move Arkansas into an age-appropriate and evidence-based continuum of sexual health education.”

AACF formed the coalition in 2022 after releasing data that showed 28 of every 1,000 Arkansas teenagers had given birth, almost twice the national average of 15 per 1,000 teenagers. Only 22% of teenage pregnancies were planned, according to AACF .

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“Through our research for that report, we found that teenagers aren’t any more sexually active here than they are in other states,” last week’s report states. “The key difference is access to contraceptives, especially the most effective kind, and lack of information because sexual health education isn’t required in Arkansas.”

State law says that schools teaching sex education “shall include instruction in sexual abstinence, and no funds shall be utilized for abortion referral.”

Within the confines of the law, schools can take an “abstinence-plus” approach, meaning “a curriculum that builds off a foundation of abstinence education but can also include more medically accurate and evidence-based approaches,” AACF’s report states.

A 2017 survey by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found nearly 85% of Arkansas’ 262 public school districts taught some form of abstinence, including having students sign virginity pledges, while 34 districts said they didn’t teach sex education at all.

AACF hopes to gather more recent data on schools’ sex education curricula in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Olivia Gardner, AACF’s education policy director.

“I know anecdotally from this work that lots of Arkansans would like to see changes within the system,” Gardner said. “They would like to see things happening at school, and they don’t feel comfortable having those conversations at home.”

The coalition’s recommendations include, but are not limited to:

Creating new requirements for school-based sex education “to include more medically accurate information, including opportunities to teach ‘abstinence plus’ curricula”;“Including parents and medical providers as important sources of sexual health information and abuse prevention”;Supporting the expansion of sexual violence prevention programs;Supporting existing out-of-school programs that provide sexual health educationIncluding menstruation in sex education and making feminine hygiene products more accessible;Creating a nonprofit focused on improving sexual health education.

The report proposes an eight-year timeline for enacting the recommendations, with the first few years meant to be “baby steps,” Gardner said.

Members of the coalition behind the report agree that a multi-pronged, collaborative approach is necessary to put the recommendations into action.

“Sexual health in general literally affects everybody throughout their entire life,” said Katie Clark, a member of the coalition and the founder of the Arkansas Period Poverty Project. “It’s literally why we’re all here, and in order to address it, we need to talk about all these different issues and make legislators see that [better sex education] is something that will positively affect Arkansans for years to come.”

‘Ignoring it is worse’

Teenage parents are less likely to complete high school and college, which limits their economic opportunities in a state with an already high poverty rate, Gardner said.

Babies born to teenage girls are more likely to be premature or underweight, which can create lifelong health problems. According to AACF, 9.5% of all babies in Arkansas were born with low birth weights in 2021.

Additionally, Arkansas has the nation’s highest maternal mortality rate and the third highest infant mortality rate, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. Elected officials from both parties, including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders , have expressed support for bolstering the state’s maternal and infant health care infrastructure.

While advocates agree that medically accurate sex education will help address these issues, there has been little support for sex education policies in the state Legislature in recent years. Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, introduced a 2021 bill to require “age- and developmentally appropriate” and “medically accurate and complete” sex education in K-12 public schools, but the bill did not advance.

Lawmakers from both parties were receptive to the portion of the bill regarding education about safe and healthy dating practices, Leding said in an interview.

“It was really when we got into more explicit education regarding safe sexual practices that we met resistance,” he said.

Most people can agree that reducing and preventing unsafe behaviors is important, but advocates are often met with unease when discussing how to broach such topics with teenagers, said Natalie Tibbs, executive director of the Children & Family Advocacy Center in Northwest Arkansas.

“Ignoring it is worse, so it’s about finding that balance of providing age-appropriate education that is empowering and therefore creating prevention, not curiosity,” Tibbs said. “The reality is, our kids are curious anyway, they’re talking to each other, and do we really want our children learning about it from their peers who don’t have it right, or do we want them learning from teachers?”

Tibbs is a member of AACF’s sexual health education coalition and works in child abuse prevention and victim advocacy. She said teachers should receive annual training that helps them identify and report signs of child maltreatment; state law requires educators to complete this training every four years.

Both Leding’s 2021 bill and AACF’s report emphasize teaching young people about healthy relationships and consent. Tibbs agreed that this is important to prevent both child abuse and teenage pregnancy.

“We don’t see a significantly high pregnancy rate as it relates to child abuse, but it is there, so anytime we talk about sex education, we want to make sure there’s a piece of education that relates to abuse,” Tibbs said. “…We don’t want to assume that all pregnancies are consensual.”

Legislative approaches

Rep. Aaron Pilkington, R-Knoxville, said he plans to introduce next year legislation similar to another failed 2021 bill, which would exempt feminine hygiene products from state sales tax.

Arkansas remains one of 21 states that continue to tax period products, despite exempting other health-related products. According to the state Bureau of Legislative Research , the tax costs menstruating Arkansans over $1 million per year.

Schools are not required to provide period products to students, which can lead them to miss school while menstruating or develop health problems from using other methods such as articles of clothing to stanch the bleeding, Clark said.

This highlights why menstruation should be part of sexual health education, she said, and many Arkansans have told her they did not learn about menstruation in school.

“If they don’t have the proper education, the words, the ways to describe it, they can’t educate their daughters well,” Clark said. “When people hear ‘sex education,’ they think intercourse and that’s it, but children and teens need to know what’s normal and not normal so they can ask questions.”

A proposed ballot measure to eliminate the tax on feminine hygiene products and diapers did not garner enough support to make this year’s November ballot. The ballot question committee, of which Clark is chair, submitted language to the attorney general’s office Monday, seeking approval to start gathering voters’ signatures to put the measure on the 2026 ballot.

Leding said he and other Democrats hope to reintroduce legislation about sex education in a future legislative session.

“I don’t think anybody, regardless of party, can look at the situation in Arkansas and not believe that we need to do much more,” he said.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com . Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and X .