Newly unearthed comments have sparked backlash.
A Planned Parenthood executive has sparked backlash for saying that children are “sexual” from birth and calling for porn literacy lessons for older children.
Bill Taverner, executive director of the New Jersey-based Center for Sex Education, Planned Parenthood’s sex education arm, made the newly unearthed comments in a 2015 interview, Fox News first reported.
“I think that we unfortunately have in our society, an assumption of asexuality of people with intellectual disabilities,” Taverner told the interviewer, sexuality consultant Leslie Walker-Hirsch.
“It’s a myth that’s perpetuated, and really we are all sexual beings from birth until death,” Taverner said.
Planned Parenthood itself echoed this sentiment in a guide called the “Fundamentals of Teaching Sexuality,” stating that, “sexuality is a part of life through all the ages and stages. Babies, elders, and everyone in between can experience sexuality.”
In a 2012 interview, Taverner appeared to imply that some pornography exposure could be “useful” for older children.
“I think that there’s this yearning for information that young people have that … hasn’t changed,” Taverner said in the interview, which was hosted by a local New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW).
“I think that the internet is a major influence on how people learn about sexuality,” Taverner said. “There’s access to erotica, pornography. That was very different for young people 30 years ago, certainly not as accessible, certainly not as instantaneous. So there’s a lot of information that is useful, there’s websites that are —”
“Some of it is wrong,” interrupted the interviewer, NOW’s Rebecca Lubetkin.
“Some of it is wrong, a lot of it is wrong, but there’s good stuff out there as well,” Taverner responded.
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