Targeted Invitations to Tailor: Establishing Fertility as Relevant in U.S. Sex Education

The United States faces troubling fertility trends that include high percentages of unintended pregnancies, as well as record-low fertility rates and individuals having fewer offspring than they desire. To address these problems, scholars and public health advocates have argued for the implementation of fertility information into existing sex-education curricula. In this study, we draw from 32 semi-structured interviews with secondary school sex educators to gain insight into their experiences on this front. They contended that one of the greatest barriers to their successfully teaching fertility related material was that students do not find fertility information relevant. Participants described three appeals that they employ to communicate fertility information as persistently relevant to the adolescents in their classes. Our interviews revealed that all three of these relevance appeals employ targeted invitations for students to tailor fertility information in ways that fit them personally. These findings suggest a need to re-conceptualize targeting and tailoring research in ways that connect with the goals of in situ, relevance-oriented communication, and they indicate how a focus on teaching health educators to establish fertility as relevant would help to situate future generations for better sexual and reproductive health over a lifetime.