In February, when the “canned families” controversy broke out, I wrote here on Sheet than , in which speech became worth more than the policies that protect those who live within it. A working paper shows how family moralization can have negative effects on adolescents’ health, education, and future opportunities.
According to the study, girls who spent the final years of elementary school in small municipalities under the management of mayors associated with them registered more teenage pregnancies. In the sample analyzed, the rate goes from 7.5 to 10.5 births per thousand girls, an increase of around 40%.
The effect appears among the youngest children, who were still in this school stage when the mayor took office, and not among the oldest children, who were already out of it. The analysis was carried out comparing close victories and defeats in municipalities with around 20 thousand inhabitants, which helps to isolate the effect of the change in vision on .
The authors analyze the municipal elections of 2008, 2012 and 2016 and the years of office that followed in municipalities where candidates from two parties won or lost by narrow margins: the former Brazilian Republican Party, today Republicans, associated with the Universal Church, and the Christian Social Party, incorporated into Podemos in 2023 and historically linked to members of the Assembly of God. The cut makes the connection between religious orientation and political action more visible, without suggesting that these acronyms represent all evangelicals or all Pentecostals.
In addition to the increase in early pregnancy, there are other effects: among girls aged 9 to 11, coverage drops by 19 percentage points. At the end of elementary school, female school dropouts rose from around 4% to almost 7%, and syphilis diagnoses also increased. Taken together, these results point to greater health and educational vulnerability precisely among adolescents who depend more directly on municipal public schools.
In municipal schools, under the direct administrative influence of the city hall, the provision of sexual education falls by 12.5 percentage points under these administrations. At the same time, director turnover is increasing, a sign of greater political intervention in the management of units. In state schools in the same municipality, outside the direct reach of the mayor, this pattern does not appear. The study also finds no relevant change in health, reinforcing that the main channel is not access to medical supplies, but intervention in the school and information
Furthermore, when looking at city halls of similar size governed by the right without links to these parties, the authors do not observe a relevant effect on pregnancy or on the provision of sexual education. In other words, where city halls aligned with a religiously motivated sexual morality were able to intervene in the school network, the retraction of sexual education was accompanied by a worsening in health and education indicators.
Of course, the study has its limitations: it does not follow each girl or measure the content of each class, only the retraction of sexual education in schools and the subsequent worsening of health and education indicators. Still, it reinforces a pattern already present in other works: campaigns on preventing pregnancy and STIs in schools, while public policies based on abstinence are ineffective.
This type of evidence needs to serve as a warning to conservatives and those who make the family a central issue: it only makes children and adolescents more vulnerable. In the end, the discourse on family preservation only makes sense if it is evaluated by the consequences it produces.
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