'Living with Sex' -"defeatist"

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33047, 14 October 1972, Page 16

'Living with Sex' -"defeatist"

The distribution of the booklet “Living with Sex,” to Christchurch secondary school pupils yesterday has been described as “amoral” and “defeatist” by the Christchurch committee of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards.

The committee’s president (Mr P. B. Cosgriff) said yesterday that the Women’s Lib movement, in its concern for the growing number of teenage pregnancies, was proposing the wrong solutions to the problem. “To suggest that freely available contraceptives, or at least abortion on demand, are the only solutions to the problem is to ignore the positive solutions which in the long run have best proved to help our young people to resist those emotional turbulences which are part of growing up.

“Warm human and family relationships, coupled with all-round character training are the first requisites to better equip teenagers to cope with these pressures. Sexuality involved the total person, he said, and the Women’s Lib movement did teen-agers a great disservice by tacitly approving experimentation in an area of human behaviour “which calls for qualities of responsibility and stability, which these youngsters are totally ill-equipped to handle, “Overseas experience, to quote Sweden in particular, has proved that contraceptive

instruction for young people has done nothing to reduce the illegitimacy and V.D. rates in that age group.” Sex education had a place in the education system, but it must not be divorced from parallel training in the morality of behaviour of sex, said Mr Cosgriff.