Planned Parenthood Exec Said Children Are Born ‘Sexual,’ Wants Kid Porn Literacy Lessons

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.

Taverner added that “sexting” is another issue schools need to discuss with students during sex education.

The Planned Parenthood executive made similar remarks last year, saying that while those in public health and sexology never wanted porn to be the “de facto educator,” we need to “shift our education.”

Taverner said in a 2021 interview that there is a “resistance” to discussing pornography with students because some people think it will encourage them to watch it, which Taverner called “the same faulty kind of premise as if we teach about condoms is it going to make people want to have sex with condoms. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

“Getting back to meeting people where they are, if this is what they’re doing with their cell phones and their tablets and their laptops, then we need to shift our education and stop doing the banana on a condom and think that, you know, we’ve done our thing,” he said.

Taverner said sex educators need to guide young people in thinking about their values, for example, the ethics of pornography.

“That’s not to say that there’s a right answer,” he said. “We need to have conversations about what’s missing in porn that may be different in a real relationship, and that’s not to castigate porn.”

Sex education can start as early as kindergarten, Taverner said in the 2012 interview. In kindergarten, sex education may involve talking about “what makes a family” or “the basics of germs.”

“All of that sets the foundation for a basic understanding that is useful for further conversations when we’re talking about condoms or when we’re talking about pregnancy prevention,” he said.

“Age-appropriate sex education is so important,” Taverner said. “We need to let our experts guide us.”

Monica Cline, a former Planned Parenthood sex educator, said Planned Parenthood clearly has a “distorted view of sexuality and children.”

“The pornification of our children by Planned Parenthood pays homage to the ‘Father’ of sex education, Alfred Kinsey, who claimed children are sexual from birth after sexually abusing infants and children for his research,” Cline said in a statement. “The sex-ed industry, funded in large part by our government, has adopted this depraved belief, pushing this twisted thinking onto vulnerable populations since the 1970s.”

Cline called for the government to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and for parents to “wake up and get them out of the schools in their own communities.”

Taverner has worked in the sex education field since at least 1995, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2014, he advocated for sex education at a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill.

Last year, he expressed his view that society has a “puritanical, anti-sex, eroti-phobic kind of orientation” around the topic of sex.

“We need to recognize that a lot of folks are driven by fear,” Taverner said in the same 2021 interview.