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Should high schools promote abstinence-only sexual education programs? NO
Students need to know more to make informed choices
Shannon Barry
Daily Staff Writer
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Approximately 97 out of every 1,000 women aged 15 to 19, or one million American teenagers, become pregnant each year.
While sexual education is something that everyone can benefit from, teaching sexual abstinence should come with limitations. School is there to educate children, not to create a formulated, narrow-minded human being that acts and talks like everyone else.
"In the end, they will have sex if they want to," my sixteen-year old sister said to me.
A hot topic concerning abstinence-only education are studies of virginity pledges - public declarations to abstain from sex. According to researchers from Yale and Columbia, young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, but they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex. The findings are based on a study that began in 1995, tracking 20,000 young people from high school to young adulthood.
In many ways, sexual education seems to use fear tactics as opposed to teaching the whole story to students about effective contraceptives and what to do in emergency situations. Videos of women giving birth and pictures of different sexually transmitted diseases are often viewed in the classroom and somewhat effective in keeping teenagers from becoming involved, but often the whole truth is not exposed.
While teens make up 10 percent of the population, they contract 25 percent of sexually transmitted diseases.
The main problem faced in sexual education today is the naive understanding that these diseases can only be contracted through sexual intercourse. With curiosity and half-truths of sexual education, students venture out on their own to seek the forbidden fruit, often biting off more than they can chew.
Recent studies have shown that teens are engaging in oral sex more often than having vaginal and/or anal intercourse. Millions of teenagers become infected with STDs such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV and herpes each year. Oral sex is a route of becoming infected.
Abstinence is not the only answer or the solution for every student. In the end, the importance of sexual education lies in the household. Children learn most of their sexual education in the early stages of life and censoring this information is not always a wise decision.
After a while when hearing the same words over and over - "sex is bad" - it begins to become less beneficial when no one takes the time to explain why. Rather than taking the easy way out and hounding their children, a little bit of explanation of the options children have goes a long way.
Like politics, it is not up to the teacher to decide whether someone will become affiliated with Republican, Democratic or independent parties.
School exists to teach the guidelines. There is no final answer for everyone and sexual abstinence is no different.
Shannon Barry is a Spartan Daily Staff writer.
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