Nurses Urged to Prepare for Sex Education

Editors' note: From its first issue in 1900 through to the present day, AJN has unparalleled archives detailing nurses' work and lives over more than a century. These articles not only chronicle nursing's growth as a profession within the context of the events of the day, but they also reveal prevailing societal attitudes about women, health care, and human rights. Today's nursing school curricula rarely include nursing's history, but it's a history worth knowing. To this end, From the AJN Archives highlights articles selected to fit today's topics and times.This month we reprint a brief "Professional Practice" note from the June 1969 issue about what was described as the first family planning conference for nurse educators. Speakers emphasized the need to make this subject a routine part of nursing school curricula (despite debates over the nurse's role in family planning), "so that nurses can counsel out of wisdom and not from piety or ignorance." Speakers included James Lieberman, MD, who years later coauthored with his daughter a teen sex guide, and Alan Guttmacher, MD, then president of Planned Parenthood, whose Center for Family Planning Program Development within that organization was later renamed the Guttmacher Institute in his honor.Nurses today are deeply involved in sexual and reproductive health care. In this issue, public health specialist Diane Santa Maria and colleagues offer ways to advance sexual and reproductive health care for adolescents by devising more friendly, youth-oriented clinical settings.