Claim: Abstinence-Only education disregards teens who are sexually active.
Public education was designed to meet the needs of all students. Although some students choose to wait until marriage to engage in sexual activity, studies show that the majority of students have sex before they graduate High School. Therefore, abstinence-only education programs disregard the real life facts that teens who are choosing to engage in sexual intercourse need education about birth control, STDs, and the consequences of unprotected sex.
According to the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, 46.9 percent of high school students had ever had sexual intercourse. Data also showed that every year there are approximately 831,000 pregnancies among women aged 15 to 19 years, about 9.1 million cases of STIs among persons aged 15 to 24 years, and an estimated 4,842 cases of HIV/AIDS among persons aged 15 to 24 years. These numbers demonstrate that limiting students’ sexuality education to abstinence-only programs fails to arm adolescents with accurate and sufficient knowledge to make informed decisions and keep themselves safe. In many cases, when teens are going to engage in sex no matter what message they receive, it is crucial that they know how to have protected sex. An analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2007 found that 86 percent of the decline in teen pregnancy between 1995 and 2002 was the result of improved contraceptive use and only 14 percent was the result of fewer teens engaging in sexual intercourse. If teens are armed with education, they will make wiser and healthier choices when it comes to sex.
Regardless of which side you fall on in the abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex education debate, we all can agree on the desired outcome. We want to help adolescents develop a positive and accurate understanding of sexuality, keep them safe from sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and do all that we can to prevent unintended pregnancies. From a public health perspective that is rooted in research, the most effective way to achieve this goal is through comprehensive sex education.
1 response so far ↓
lhuff // February 24, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Compelling argument.
TIP: In the second paragraph, second sentence, you begin, “Data also showed…” I assume you’re referring to the data from the survey you cited in previous sentence, but you must make the source of data clear to reader. Do so by adding another signal phrase: ” The same survey also showed…”