Negotiating Morality: Teaching and Archiving the Struggle for Comprehensive Sex Education in the Post-Roe Era

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Memory as Method in Education: Policy Histories, Community Pedagogies, and Liberatory Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This paper traces how conflicts over sex education in midcentury California have shaped ongoing efforts across the U.S. to restrict school discussions of autonomy, gender, and sexuality. These dynamics shaped the structure and focus of the undergraduate course Race and the Politics of Reproduction, which I taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In the course, students examined how race, gender, and sexuality are regulated through the intersecting forces of schools, churches, and medical institutions. Teaching this course in a post-Roe context required actively resisting the classroom conditions that mirror the very systems we critique. When educators suppress students' curiosity under the guise of neutrality or authority, they also dull their own capacity to think and feel critically alongside their students (Freire, 2000). This course treats popular sex education as a political archive and method for reclaiming the classroom as a space where historical analysis and collective intervention are inseparable.

Theoretical Framework(s)
Critical pedagogy (Freire, 2021) anchors the project by treating classrooms and archives as spaces where learners collectively trace how knowledge about bodies is produced, circulated, and withheld. Biopower (Foucault, 1990) extends this inquiry, showing that struggles over sex education are techniques of governance that sort populations, enforce moral hierarchies, and expose certain lives to abandonment through policy, curriculum, and public discourse. Reproductive Justice (Ross & Solinger, 2017) binds these insights, insisting that bodily autonomy, racial freedom, and economic security rise and fall together, and that faith-based arguments can be mobilized for liberation rather than control.

Methodology & Data Sources
Materials from Catholics for Choice include posters and pamphlets that demonstrate how faith-based advocates used visual culture to challenge dominant narratives and reframe public conversations about bodily autonomy. The Dorman L. Commons files contribute hearing transcripts, staff reports, and letters from parents written between 1962 and 1970. These records reveal how, influenced by anti-communist rhetoric, parents often interpreted discussions of sexual pleasure as moral corruption and viewed critical inquiry in the classroom as a threat to social stability (Bialystok & Andersen, 2022). These archival sources spotlight the interplay between community advocacy and state authority, showing how moral fear, political ideology, and educational policy came together to shape California’s contested approach to sex education.

Study Findings & Scholarly Significance
Archival analysis shows how sex-education debates in California were shaped by the tension between grassroots religious advocacy and state bureaucracy. Catholics for Choice materials reveal faith-based campaigns that used visual culture and testimony to cast bodily autonomy as a moral duty grounded in justice and care, reclaiming faith for accessibility and democratic learning. The Dorman L. Commons records, by contrast, document policy efforts that framed sexuality through population management and moral discipline.
This study advances scholarship in three ways: it positions popular sex education as a framework linking critical pedagogy with reproductive justice; it demonstrates the value of reading visual and faith-based sources alongside policy records to expose institutional contradictions; and it supplies historical grounding for curricula that resist censorship while harnessing faith as a force for educational justice.

Author

• Gabriela G. Corona Valencia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign