You Won't Believe What Happened When Mom Live-Tweeted Abstinence Talk in Sex Ed Class

A mom and medical professor caused an international sensation when she live-tweeted a lecture on abstinence presented in her son’s East Lansing High School sex-ed class. (Photo by Made Underground via Creative Commons/Flickr)

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A Michigan mom and medical professor who gained international notoriety for live tweeting harsh criticism of an anti-abortion, pro-abstinence speaker during her son’s sex ed class has been banned from the school.

It wasn’t specifically Alice Dreger’s thorny tweets that got her banned from attending East Lansing High School activities – though the 140-character barbs did end up shaming the school district in the Washington Post, London’s Daily Mail, USA Today and social media sites, BuzzFeed, Salon and Vox.

Rather, what got Dreger kicked off school property was the string of vulgarities she directed at the program instructor after the class, Lansing State Journal columnist Judy Putnam wrote.

Coby Fletcher, the high school principal, issued a statement that read, in part:

“... I support the appropriate expression of a plurality of viewpoints; however, I am very concerned by the utter lack of civility I see conveyed in the tweets and the behavior the tweeter admits to exhibiting in the classroom. This is not representative of the conduct we expect to see adults model for our students.”

Dreger, a writer and professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, admitted on Twitter that she ”lost it.”

She decided to live-tweet the discussion after learning about it from her son. Both are skeptical about the value of abstinence education, according to an essay Dreger wrote for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger.

“The whole lesson here is sex is part of a terrible lifestyle. Drugs, unemployment, failure to finish school – sex is part of the disaster.” – Alice Dreger tweet

To be clear, abstinence education is required curricula in Michigan school districts that offer sex ed classes, and East Lansing’s is not an abstinence-only sex education class.

The SMART (Sexually Mature Aware Responsible Teens) program that Dreger tweeted was presented by an instructor with the Pregnancy Center of Greater Lansing, where services include counseling pregnant women to avoid abortions.

“He Actually Just Said That”

Some of the tweets that led to the dust-up in the liberal Midwest college town include:

“’You’ll find a good girl. If you find one that says ‘no,’ that’s the one you want.’ HE ACTUALLY JUST SAID THAT.”

“The whole lesson here is sex is part of a terrible lifestyle. Drugs, unemployment, failure to finish school – sex is part of the disaster.”

“Condoms. They fail. You get pregnant. Your friends leave you. You drop out of school. Your kids end up in the army.”

Who’s right in this situation depends on who you ask.

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Stephan Turner, whose son is a senior at East Lansing, urged the school not to lift the ban prohibiting Dreger from attending school events that don’t specifically involve her son. Turner and said in a letter that Dreger’s “vulgarity and behavior was despicable and disrespectful to the teacher and other students,” the Lansing State Journal’s Putnam wrote in her column.

But Stuart White, also a father of a student at the school, said focusing on the school district’s embarrassment about “tweets littered with the f-bomb” comes at the expense of the issues Dreger raised.

“Profanity can take many shapes including a teacher trying to scare young men and women into avoiding sex until marriage for fear of unwanted pregnancy, a failed life, or some other dreaded outcome brought on supposedly by the inability to just say no,” he wrote in an email to Putnam.

Tell Us:

• What do you think? Does abstinence-only education – and especially fear-based abstinence education – work? What approach should schools take in teaching sex education?

Dreger’s tweets are compiled below.