Policy by pathology

POLICY BY PATHOLOGY

THE BIG PUSH is on. In recent months attention has been focused on teenage pregnancy and school-based clinics trying to prevent it. We are told that such clinics, dispensing contraceptives and referring for abortion, are springing up "across the country.' In fact, it seems there are fifty to sixty of these clinics, affecting but a tiny fraction of the 14 million high-school students in the country. Some see the highly publicized "experiments' in places such as Chicago and New York as an opening wedge toward making such clinics universal. Others say the clinics are a specific response to the "pregnancy epidemic' among the black "underclass.' It is hard to know which is more troubling.

One question is whether teenage pregnancy is really the problem. Another question is whether such clinics actually reduce teenage pregnancy. Family-policy expert Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute has studied the data and concludes that such programs probably increase rather than decrease the incidence of student pregnancies. One study documents an increase in the number of pregnancies avoided, while another documents an increase in pregnancies. Carlson believes the paradox is not hard to explain: "A spiral of more sexually active teenagers, more contraception, more sexual encounters per teenager, and some level of contraceptive failure would produce both a rising level of averted pregnancies and a rising level of real pregnancies.' And, if course, a rising level of aborted pregnancies, the recommended "backstop' to contraceptive failure.

Seventeen years as a pastor in black Brooklyn have convinced this writer that teenage pregnancy is not the problem. It is, rather, a symptom of the catastrophic collapse of the family in the bottom half of urban black America. There are many reasons for this collapse, ranging from welfare policies to the anti-family propaganda of the entertainment industry to the failure of black churches. A big factor is the government school system.

There is a cruelly twisted logic in the argument that more intervention by government schools can solve the problems created, in significant part, by government schools. In black Brooklyn, the public-school system and those in charge of it are as alien an institution as the branch of Chemical Bank. Schools, which were once meant to assist families, now increasingly seek to displace families. Sex clinics are but the opening of another front in the public schools' war against families. As a top administrator of the New York system explained to me, "If we could get hold of these kids earlier and control them longer, we could do more about the negative influences they get at home.'

Admittedly, there is a circularity here. The schools say they must take over because families have broken down, and by taking over they weaken whatever family structure remains. This is social policy by pathology, and it assures the growth of the pathology. The opening sentence of a New York Times editorial on the sex clinics reads: "New York City's schoolchildren take early sex for granted.' That is false. Some do, some don't. This is evident in a

feature story in the same paper that explains why sex clinics must be "comprehensive,' offering many other services. Otherwise, we are told, students seen going to a clinic will bear the "stigma' of being sexually active. But, at the same time that it declares juvenile rutting to be routine, the Times deplores the power of peer pressure toward promiscuity. There are few teenagers in Bedford-Stuyvesant who read the Times, but their teachers do, and the policymakers do. They build policies premised upon what they perceive as normal and therefore, by implication, normative. The result is policies premised upon the weaknesses rather than the strengths of the communities that, we must believe, the policymakers sincerely want to serve.

Policy by pathology is the epidemic that afflicts the black underclass. Instead of taking their cue from blacks who have worked their way out of poverty, the policymakers concentrate on those who have not. Similarly with educational achievement and similarly with family stability. Vast amounts of money are spent on "the problem,' which means they are spent on the putative problem-solvers. The sex clinic is but the latest episode. The program to expand schooling downward to ages four and three is another part of the syndrome. The implicit goal is to establish the government school as a "total institution' unchallengeably in charge of the socialization of the marginated young. There are numerous fiscal, political, and legal obstacles to the complete realization of that goal. But it has already been realized enough to severely cripple the crucial mediating structures--family, church, self-help organizations --of urban black America. There are no guarantees that the damage already done can be remedied.

WHAT REMEDY there might be begins with calling the pathological by its proper name. We must not resign ourselves to viewing the pathological as normal and, in the face of the grimmest evidence, must refuse to declare the statistically normal to be normative. Above all, government and other agencies must begin to accent not pathologies but potentialities. Desperately needed are programs that strengthen rather than displace the institutions--beginning with the family--that have the primary mandate and potential for socializing the young. That, it seems to this writer, is the main message in the thoroughly justified protest against high-school sex clinics.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning