This subject is of utmost importance to all teens and young people.
Thank goodness each day more and more adults become aware that Abstinence-Only Sex Education is primarily designed to serve social and political goals, rather than produce any solid public health outcomes for young people; this is expected of educated caring adults.
Abstinence-only sex education is a moral and religious issue that will not be settled by any of the present research unless it begins to show parents, educators, and policy makers the positive health benefits for young people. All efforts must be geared to truly meet the tests of science and the real world needs of young people.
Like it or not, sexual activity is a reality for teens in America, and it is hard to imagine a school based intervention which will magically undo the media pressures and natural hormonal urges that young people experience.
Intelligent people can easily see that promoting abstinence and providing basic health promotion information to young people can work together. The central question is whether accurate information about sexual self-protection is being made available to all young people so that they can have the tools to protect themselves in sexual situations. The answer is definitely no. Abstinence-only sex education does not teach young people how to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy.
There are positive arguments for sex education that stresses the importance of family values, ethical values like respect for self and others, responsibility, self-discipline, integrity, self-control, kindness, fairness, etc. The bottom line may be “value neutral”; emphasizing individual choices by young people rather than moral absolutes.
Intelligent people will never argue that abstinence is the only 100% effective method of preventing pregnancy and STDs. A Teen’s world does not operate on any 100% method and statistics clearly show that young people often don’t want to abstain and often don’t abstain even after signing an abstaining agreement with their parents. Therefore young people need to be taught the benefits of abstinence while also taught about contraception and disease-prevention methods, including condom and contraceptive use.
Values should be freely chosen by teens after the alternatives and their consequences are evaluated. Therefore, traditional values and religious faith are personal moral issues that every young person should be encouraged to carefully consider.
However every young person most certainly needs to be taught how to protect his or her self in the event they unexpectedly want to engage in a sexual act. This means that every teen definitely needs to be prepared on each date. They should be taught to carry condoms and know how to use condoms and to never one time participate in unprotected sex of any type.
“It is ignorance, not knowledge, that harms children!” It is ignorant not to teach about contraception and condoms and not to acknowledge that many teenagers will become sexually active. It is ignorant not to discuss abortion and not to teach teens the details about STDs, HIV, and AIDS.
Proof of this is that even though teen pregnancy and birth rates have declined in recent years, the US still has the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancy of any industrialized country in the world.
Statistics show that each year 3.75 million teenagers will contract an STI. There are about one million teen pregnancies and about half a million teen births each year.
STIs can lead to significant personal, social and economic consequences. Pelvic inflammatory disease, which is often the consequence of an untreated or improperly treated STI, is responsible for at least 30% of cases of infertility among American women.
STIs can cause ectopic pregnancies, reproductive cancers, spontaneous abortions or still births, and other health problems, and make women 2-5 times more vulnerable to HIV infection. Teens that catch a STI can suffer these and other problems many years later.
There are other potential costs to unprotected sexual activity among teenagers. Research has shown that adolescent girls who become mothers are less likely to complete high school.
“Children born to younger teens may also experience poorer health outcomes, lower educational attainment, and higher rates of adolescent childbearing themselves when compared to children born to older mothers.”
