Free (1987) The Celestial Bed by Irving Wallace

grammar schools and high schools — is known as sex education. This blatant and provocative teaching is being pressed on our young and unformed heirs.
    ‘Speak to anyone who favours sex education in our classrooms instead of in our homes, and more often than not you will find yourself talking to someone who also favours unrestricted abortion, dangerous gay rights, atheism, and Communism.
    ‘Tonight, my Brothers and Sisters, I want you to listen to some facts - actual facts - that have come to light on the matter of sex education.
    ‘According to the latest available statistics, for youngsters between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, there were 1,181,000 pregnancies in a single year - roughly half of them leading to abortions, and half to births.
    ‘Obviously, these unwanted pregnancies were provoked by the kind of sex education going on throughout the states of America — the teachings, by untrained or ill-trained instructors, on every sexual subject from the use of contraceptives to sexual techniques to orgasms. This, in the face of the facts produced by a recent Yankelovich, Skelly, White survey that 84 per cent of parents of teenagers polled feel that it is up to them to inform their children about sexual matters, a responsibility that should be borne only by caring families and not by politicised schools.
    ‘Let me reveal to you a horror story that has recently been exposed in our own backyard. In the high school of San Marcos, California, over 20 per cent of the young girl students were found to be pregnant by the year 1984. When the school board learned
    that fact, the members were quick to reassess the school’s sex education programme and modify it sharply.
    ‘When you learn the shocking statistic that 48 per cent of the states have no guideline policies on sex teachings, and leave policymaking up to local school boards, then you realise that you must have a voice in the decision-making by letting your school board know you have an eye on it and will hold its members accountable for sinful behaviour they promote under the guise of education.
    ‘We must all act in concert with The Women’s Committee for Responsible Government, which has already sued the state of California for spending public money on subversive sex education in our schools. We must join hand in hand to stop this systematic corruption of the innocent. We, too, must become the Godfearing, God-loving moral majority of this wonderful nation.’
    Scrafield droned on and on, and Darlene Young dutifully and attentively listened.
    When he had concluded, Scrafield set his script aside and looked up. ‘What do you think, Darlene?’
    ‘Very good, very frightening,’ she said. ‘Are those statistics actually true?’
    ‘True blue, you bet. You ought to know. You hired that researcher, Chet Hunter, to research it for me. He’s got a reputation for accuracy.’
    ‘Yes, he’s good.’
    Scrafield studied his wristwatch. ‘We’ve still got fifteen minutes or more before the limo comes by to take us to the television studio. I could use a little relaxation, I guess, before going on the air. You up to it, baby?’
    She nodded with fake enthusiasm. ‘You know I am.’
    As Scrafield reached down to the fly of his shorts, she wondered fleetingly why this change had taken place a few months ago. It had always been his habit, in times before, and always before he went on the air, to take her to bed. He had claimed he needed loosening up. He would take her to bed for a quickie.
    But lately there was no more bed. There was only this. She wondered if, turning forty, she had become less attractive to him. Her blonde hair bleached brighter, her face puffier, her large breasts drooping further, and a bit thicker around the waistline and hips. Or was it simply that he had tired of her somewhat,
    become more impatient, and had aged himself and wanted to be relieved more easily without having to work for it?
    She could see that he had opened his shorts and bared