SEX EDUCATION AND GUIDANCE : AN EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM

Abstract

SEXUAL intercourse outside marriage is generally regarded as a breach of our moral code. It is impossible therefore to gauge exactly the extent to which it is occurring, but the extra-marital conceptions and venereal disease infections which often result from it are some measure of its frequency. Roughly a hundred thousand of the children born in Great Britain during 1938 were conceived outside marriage, and during the same year there were at a rough estimate forty-seven thousand new cases of venereal disease. Not every sex adventure leads to conception, however, and the patients who have contracted venereal disease from their first illicit intercourse are very much in the minority. Consequently, extra-marital intercourse must be by no means uncommon.