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Debates over sex education policy in the United States between supporters of abstinence-only and comprehensive programs reflect a deeper issue about who takes responsibility for care, when, how, and why. In this article, I explore the question who cares by comparing abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education curricula and build on Joan Tronto's idea of privileged irresponsibility to examine responsibility as a conceptual site where power intersects with care. Three specific claims arise from this analysis that speak to central issues in the public ethic of care. First, I contend that the biological act of sex should be recognized as a basic human need essential to understanding the moral subject and a political community's relationships as fully as possible, a goal of the feminist ethics of care. Second, I identify, what I call, the double burden of moral responsibility as a necessary, though previously unseen, component of privileged irresponsibility that addresses issues of care and equality. Finally, I illustrate how morality functions in the decision-making processes central to deliberative democracy in order to suggest that work on public care attend to this often unseen dimension of politics. Comparing the ideological commitments to responsibility in approaches to sex education policy ultimately reveals the need to move beyond personal and social to collective responsibility to advance institutionalizing care in a way potentially transformative of democratic politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]