Teenage Sex in Northern Europe vs North America

In My Humble Opinion
1

I started writing a response to this thread, and realized I had my own questions/musings on the issue.

Mods, feel free to move it if this is the wrong forum.

This is really really confusing me. I grew up in Germany and Denmark, and we had once-yearly segments on sexuality (menstruation, wet dreams and the like) and sexual protection (the different forms of birth control, etc etc). Both the school I transferred out of in ninth grade and the school I graduated from had graduating classes between 100 to 200 students. Not one of my fellow students ever got pregnant. Furthermore, I’ve never known anyone at either of those schools over the past decade that got pregnant.

It would have been laughable. We (well, most of us) screwed like bunnies (especially at the boarding school in Denmark - our own rooms!), but it was taken for granted that your were going to use protection, because that was what had been drilled into us. You used condoms, or the pill - but the latter only after both partners got tested for STI’s by the school nurse. If the condom broke (or if you had unprotected sex, but this was not cool in the extreme), you trundled off to the infirmary to get the morning-after pill. The nurse proscribed both the 72hr- and the regular pill (and you could choose to pay cash or have it put on your school bill, depending on whether your parents were comfortable/knew of your activities), and was always on hand for questions. Condoms were bought at the gas station down the street or at the super-market in town.

I don’t mean to glorify my home culture, but this was just the way it was. I also remember pretty much every youth magazine I ever read having articles about “common STI-myths” which were then thoroughly debunked. Getting pregnant was just not an option. We realized that in order to have sex we’d have to take certain precautions so as not to fuck up our lives and plans by having babies/screwing up our chances of having them later, so we made damn sure to take them.

Leaving aside the "abstinence-only education debate, how is it an acceptable thing for a high-school girl to get pregnant, or for a guy to get a girl pregnant? I understand that it happens, but isn’t there some sort of societal more that prohibits the acceptance of that outcome in terms of societal rejection?

I’m not sure I’m formulating myself properly here.

What I mean is that at my schools, had a girl gotten pregnant (let’s assume unintentionally - trophy babies and the like are a whole 'nother issue), both she and the boy involved would have been criticized and ridiculed by the whole school. “What, they thought pulling out was gonna help? How dumb do you have to be to be knocked up?” Discussion would have ensued as to how pro-active they were - “did they use a condom/the pill? If it broke, did they get the 72hr pill?” and if they didn’t, they’d be roundly abused as idiots for putting themselves in that situation.

Note this treatment would have nothing to do with the idea of abortion or keeping the baby (profoundly personal choices), just with the fact that they’d let it get so far so as to have to face that choice.
I guess my question is, what are the reasons why the cultural standards of the US (or North America, or whatever) differ so greatly from my experiences in Northern Europe? I’ll qualify that the two schools were predominantly Caucasian, relatively well-off, one a private and the other a public school.

2

One girl that I knew personally in my class got pregnant. There were probably several others in my graduating class; my hometown is known for a high teen pregnancy rate and it’s very conservative and religious, which doesn’t help.

Anyway, I don’t remember anyone making fun of her. People acted like it just happened and that was that. She got to stay in school until she started to “show”, then she went on home study and stayed on it until graduation a year and some later. She got to walk with our class. She came to class to show off the baby once.

Now in college (different area, geographically and definitely more liberal) I’ve known girls that got pregnant. Nothing was said to their faces, but once they went home or whatever all anyone said was “How dumb do you have to be? The school hands out condoms like candy at Halloween!” People felt sorry that the girls just threw their education away like that, but I never saw anything like that in high school. Then again, a high school education, marrying and starting a family by mid-twenties is par for the course where I went to high school.

3

Wow, I wish my school’s sexual health and education system had been like yours in Germany and Denmark. (United States-ian speaking.) Our public school system was strictly forbidden from teaching any form of contraception until the last year of health education. Teachers could get fired for it. I have no recollection of STDs being taught until the last year either.

In the last year, my teacher, while very blunt and straightforward, was also an “abstinence is the best option” promoter, because that’s the attitude the school had to take. There was a petition once where they tried to get condoms offered at the nurse’s office, but I’m pretty sure that was shot down. Sex education lasted two weeks in the final health class, and about a couple days focused on contraception, three days on sexual health (checking for cancer and all that) and about a week focused on STDs. I don’t think abortion or adoption were even mentioned except in passing.

As for teen pregnancy, there were three people within my “I know you” group who got pregnant (that group probably had around 75-100 girls in it). One dropped out, one graduated before giving birth, and one had her baby and kept going to school. I don’t remember any comments being made at all about them, really, just things like “Did you hear So-and-so’s pregnant?” “Oh my goodness! Who’s the father? When’s the baby due?” etc. It was a shock and hot topic of gossip, but the people I knew never openly voiced judgments about the teen mom’s carelessness.

4

I’d say it is the huge religious influence in public life and in schools in particular. US religious folk are very big on the just-say-no abstinence model of “sex education”, and appear to believe that proper detailed sex education corrupts their children and will lead them astray, despite the very solid evidence that it prevents ignorant experimentation.

5

I’m betting that’s the key difference the OP is looking for right there, though the U.S. is so vast it’s hard to generalize. But frankly, I can’t imagine a school nurse prescribing a morning after pill at any of the high schools I’m familiar with (and I’m studying to be a teacher). Something worse than being fired would happen to her if she did; she (or he) might very well be sued.
From what I know of Europe from talking to English/German/Swedish friends, the attitudes about sex are just more practical and mechanistic than in the United States. Sex is perceived as more of a physical act than one rife with emotional/spiritual overtones. Not only that, but the schools in most of the U.S. are much more closely controlled/influenced by parents and the local community. I don’t think educators or the school administration is as shielded from backlash here as elsewhere. This is one of the problems/advantages of our educational system, depending on how you look at it. Every teacher knows better than to bring up a subject like this. There’re not about to get fired.

As for pregnancy, the reaction the OP describes is rather shocking to me. It seems cruel. Getting pregnant is a natural thing to do, albeit unfortunate in these circumstances. The girls I knew who got pregnant in school usually wound up that way out of either some misguided sense of love for their boyfriend, or yes, ignorance. The 'ol “it will never happen to me” type of thinking that better education would’ve prevented.

6

This is only a small part of the issue, but many schools in the U.S. don’t have a full-time nurse on duty–schools have to share a nurse.

Birth control pills can also only be prescribed to by a limited group of medical professionals and would not typically be provided without a full exam, including a pelvic exam and pap smear. I’m a married adult and I probably would have a hard time getting my doctor to forgo the yearly exam required to get my prescription renewed. Aside from condoms and contraceptive creams, sponges, etc., this is pretty much true of all other forms of birth control, too–diaphragms, IUD’s, hormone rings/patches, etc.

7

No nurse (RN or other) can prescribe anything in the USA–certainly not the morning after pill! If I want my son to have plain Tylenol at school, I either have to go to the school and give it to him or have a doctor’s note before the start of the school year, with a bottle of the medicine marked with his name. It sounds sensible, but it’s really burdensome and contrary to actual health care.

I much prefer the approach the sensible Danes and Dutch have (although we have a strong Dutch-ancestry community nearby–South Holland, IL-- that supports abstinence only and reviles sex ed). I think it’s more a cultural thing. In America, for whatever reason, many, many people think that exposure to sex facts and behaviors should be learned at home. The fact that almost no parents bother to teach their kids anything at all is beside the point (it’s not, really, but that is the thinking–you won’t teach my kid about sex. I will. But you don’t, the health teachers and nurses cry. And so it goes).
It’s a damned shame.

8

That’s not actually true. A Nurse-Practitioner can prescribe everything a doctor can, but very few of them work in schools (other than elite private boarding schools).

9

I seem to remember my high school having pretty comprehensive classes on sex ed & birth control. I don’t even think it was much of an issue, if at all. It was just part of Health class which all students had to take. (And I think the first class about sex ed was actually in the 3rd or 4th grade.) I don’t remember ever hearing about a teen pregnancy when I was at school either. (This was in a public school on Long Island, several hundred students, mostly white middle-upper class.)

10

I don’t know about “acceptable.” In earlier eras, it was unspeakable. It happened plenty, but it was still unspeakable. One of two things would happen.

— The girl was Sent Away, to a home for unwed mothers or to live with relatives until she gave birth. The child was given up for adoption. The guy (who of course was the scum of the earth, and had to have taken the girl against her will, because Nice Girls Didn’t) was forbidden to have contact with the girl again ever.

— The two teenagers were forced into marriage. The girl never completed her education. The boy had to work shit jobs for the rest of his life. They grew to hate each other, and the child, though they often kept having more babies. Three, or four, or five lives ruined.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing that we’ve stopped pinning scarlet letters on pregnant teens.

11

Hmm… I’m not convinced that what the OP is describing is really representative. Now, maybe France and Denmark are very different in their attitudes re teen sex, but I don’t think that’s the issue here.
I think the issue is that the behavior of teens differs widely within the same country. For instance I think that teens from lower class families in a disfranchised area attending a vocational school won’t have the same attitudes regarding sex as kids coming from middle-class families in a vibrant capital city and studying in a very reputable high school.

I do not doubt that what the OP is describing (teens fucking like rabbits, being extremely well-informed and very responsible) is true (though…) but I’m pretty certain that other young Danes had completely different experiences. People are so widely different and the social codes differ so much from one segment of a given population to another that I think it’s prudent not to try to extrapolate on the basis of one’s experience.

Now, I do think there’s a significant difference between the USA and western Europe, even only on the basis of what I can read on this board. Many issues that are frequently discussed here, like “sex-ed” based on abstinence are essentially unheard of over here. Other issues may be less of a problem in western Europe (like teen pregnancy, though we would need hard figures to know that for sure), but it doesn’t mean they are non-existing. There definitely are european teens who don’t fuck like rabbits, european teens asking idioic questions about sex on message boards, so showing they’re both poorly informed and unable to think of a reliable source for such informations, and european teens who are irresponsile regarding their sexual activity, even though they might be both well informed and fucking like rabbits.
By the way, in France teens (both boys and girls) have, on average, their first intercourse when they are 17, and this hasn’t changed for more than 20 years. And it seems to me that the statistics are the same in the USA (vague memory of having read it on this board). So, maybe the behavior of teens isn’t that different on both sides of the Atlantic ocean.
I’m not sure this issue is a matter of (humble) opinions. I suspect we would havea bettr picture using hard facts (teen pregnancies, STD rates, laws regulating availability of contraception for minors, etc…).

12

True, dat. I got a prescription from a nurse-practitioner when I lived in Oregon. I got the impression they were more common out West, where the population density was so low it was hard to get doctors.

13

As others have said, attitudes seem to vary depending on how highly valued education is in the population.

In highschool, I met a girl from another school who was 14 and visibly pregnant. At 18, my friend got knocked up by some random bar hookup and decided to keep the baby. For both, the prevailing attitude in everyone else seemed to be “huh. Interesting.”

In grad school, my friend (age 27) discovered that she has a rare disorder that made her odds of conceiving about 5% of normal and would only get worse with time. Since she wanted offspring, she and her husband tried and she delivered about 6 months ago. You should have heard the snide remarks. She actually had to send out an email to the school explaining why she had decided to get pregnant. Because, at age 27 it is anyone’s business. :rolleyes:

14

Hmmm. I just noticed how singularly un-profound my last post was.
Sorry. If I manage to scrape together a genuine insight, I’ll come back.

15

These statistics might be of interest:

Percent who have not had intercourse by age 20:

                                 Boys  Girls

Belgium 61 63
Netherlands 58 62
Germany 33 28
Norway 33 25
U K. 24 23
France 9 25
United States 12 16

Percent of sexually active single 15 to 19-year olds using birth control:
Germany 95%
United Kingdom 92
Netherlands 88
Norway 87
Sweden 79
Denmark 70
United States 56

Teen pregnancies per 1,000 teenagers:

United States 98.0
United Kingdom 46.6
Norway 40.2
Canada 38.6
Finland 32.1
Sweden 28.3
Denmark 27.9
Netherlands 12.1
Japan 10.5

Total teen abortions per 1,000 teenagers:

United States 44.4
Norway 21.1
Sweden 19.6
Denmark 18.2
Finland 17.9
United Kingdom 16.9
Canada 16.2
Japan 5.9
Netherlands 5.5

16

The above statistics were gathered in 1991, and are presented with the intention to counter anti-liberal political arguments.

Most striking is that liberal countries (I’m grouping the UK, Germany and the Netherlands here) all have stats American Republicans *say *they strive for. Our kids start sex later then US kids, our teens get pregnant a lot less then American teens. And all this good stuff this isn’t achieved because our godless, liberal teens have one abortion after another. No, to add insult to injury these three countries even have a far, far lower abortion rate then the US.

And how is this achieved? Because more European teenagers are on birth control.

If the Conservative American Right were actually serious about wanting to reduce both the number of teen pregnancies and abortions, they’d follow our example. Instead, they foolhardly keep preaching abstinence. Which introduces the whole issue of “good, and bad, moral and immoral, sin and punishment” in to the equasion, where it really has no business. But preaching abstinece is totally counterproductive when it comes to actually reducing teen pregnancy and teen abortions. The Conservative stance in these matters is stupid to the point of being truly evil.

17

We don’t want results. We want to preach.

18

In Los Angeles, it’s acceptable enough that there’s a high school that’s just for pregnant girls. Well, maybe that means it isn’t acceptable because they have to go to a separate school. But I think they started the school more for practical reasons, than because of social mores. My assistant went to that school, and she says it allowed her to take care of her baby without dropping out.

19

My guess is that a big part of your answer is right here. I’d be very surprised if there were high rates of pregnancy in boarding schools in the US. Kids at boarding schools tend to come from well-to-do, well-educated families, where there’s a huge stigma against teen pregnancy. It would be interesting to compare the abortion rates with those of kids at “regular” high schools.

I went to a large urban high school with a high percentage of kids from poor neighborhoods. There were a number of girls in my year who were pregnant or had babies by the time we graduated. These girls weren’t stupid–they knew that condoms prevented pregnancy. But if your mom, your sisters and your cousins all had babies in their teens, that seems normal. Realistically, college was a big financial and cultural stretch for most of these girls; the local job prospects weren’t great; and there weren’t a ton of “marriage-material” men in their neighborhoods. It’s possible to move up from those circumstances, but it’s hard. I don’t think any of them got pregnant on purpose, but when young motherhood is the norm and you don’t see a great future ahead, how hard are you going to insist when your boyfriend doesn’t want to wear a condom?

I’d argue that the real prospect of economic mobility is at least as important as better sex ed in convincing girls not to have babies.

20

That is really surprising. The Netherlands is thought of as a sexual free-fire zone amongst many Americans I know, including myself; a place where hookers are easy to find and work openly, 50% of the populations are swingers, etc. Huh. What do I know? Not much, apparently!