A 16 year old girl testified to the commission on Population Growth and the American Future:

How can high school girls be expected to be responsible about using birth control when all knowledge is gotten on the street?  Many don’t even have a clear picture of how babies are made.  “Oh I thought you couldn’t get pregnant if he only comes             one time” a girl once told me.  “You can only get pregnant right after your period,” said another.  And then there are others who knew about the pill so they took their mother’s, sister’s and friend’s pills or they took a pill before they had sex or after they had sex.  Most girls just pray.

            What causes this huge group of uninformed teenagers?  Some blame the media.  Others blame the parents.  Mostly people blame society.  The true culprit?  Improper sex education.  That’s why I feel abstinence-only sex education should be abolished from our schools.

            There are several reasons why abstinence-only sex education needs to be abolished.  It’s a form of censorship, it affronts the principle of church and state separation, it silences speech about sexual orientation, and it’s ineffective and causes ignorance about sex.

            Federal law specifies that the “exclusive purpose” of abstinence-only programs must be to teach that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity” and that “sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects“.

            Students in abstinence-only programs, such as the one in place at Woodruff and all District 150 schools, receive only information consistent with the abstinence-until-marriage message.  Instead of a comprehensive look of the facts about contraception, safer sex practices and sexuality, they often receive false and exaggerated information about contraceptive failures and are told that contraceptives undermine romance and spontaneity.  Sexuality is usually not discussed unless it’s in a negative sense.  Abortion is often presented as morally wrong and physically and emotionally dangerous.

            How the current system of abstinence-only sex education came to be is an interesting story of political right wing activists and federal funding.  In 1981, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act, which funded educational programs to promote “self-discipline and other morally acceptable approaches” to adolescent sex.  Grant applications to create such programs poured in, and the dollars poured out to churches and religious conservatives nationwide.  Over a decade later, the Supreme Court stated that funded programs must delete direct references to religion.  As a result, the granting process was stopped, but sadly, it was too late because some of the biggest federal grant recipients had already turned their curricula into huge profit yielding businesses.  In 1996, Congress struck again, attaching a provision to welfare legislation that established federal programs to fund programs teaching abstinence-until-marriage exclusively.  Approximately $100,000,000, including matching state funds, is spent annually on programs that have as their exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological and health gains realized by abstaining from sexual activity.

            The result of this focus on abstinence-until-marriage sex education has been widespread censorship of sexual information.  Materials on contraception and sexually transmitted diseases have been cut from textbooks.  Articles about sexuality have been censored in the student press.  Such is the case with Woodruff’s school newspaper.  Most teachers avoid discussing sexuality at all.  Teachers have been warned against talking about other certain topics and some have been disciplined and threatened with lawsuits.  Schools now block student access to sexual information in class, at the school library and through the public library’s internet portals.  This clearly keeps pertinent sex information out of the hands of the people who need it the most.

            The founding fathers of America built this country on the principles of separation of church and state.  Abstinence-only sex education affronts this principle.  Like efforts to discourage the teaching of evolution, abstinence-only sex education is promoted by religious groups, the same ones creating the abstinence only sex education curriculum, so the more abstinence-only sex classes created, the more money religious groups make.  In Pennsylvania, Alabama, California and many other states, schools host chastity rallies on school grounds during school hours.  During these rallies, students are asked to pledge “to God” to remain abstinent until marriage.  Due to Congress, hundreds of millions of dollar each year are forced to go to abstinence-only education.  Some of this money goes to the religious organizations running the abstinence-only sex education like in Montana when the Catholic diocese of Helena received $14,000 from the state‘s Department of Health.  The government funding of religious groups violates the separation of church and state policies, the core principal this great country was founded on.

            Censorship and the violations of the separation of church and state policies aren’t the only reason abstinence-only sex education should be abolished, abstinence-only sex education excludes information and discussion about gay and lesbian sexuality.  With its emphasis on marriage as the expected standard of human sexual activity and its statement that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects, abstinence-only sex education builds hostility to the very idea of same sex relationships and chastises students who are, or thought to be, gay or lesbian.  With fear of ridicule and abuse already in the back of most in-the-closet gays’ and lesbians’ minds, abstinence only sex education only makes a bad situation worse.

            Another reason why abstinence-only sex education should be abolished is because it’s ineffective.  There is little evidence to support that abstinence-only sex education is effective in achieving its goals of reducing non marital sex and teen pregnancy rates.  It’s so ineffective that almost every reputable sex education organization in the USA, along with the American Medical Association have denounced abstinence-only sex education.

            The biggest problem with abstinence-only sex education is it promotes ignorance.  Fewer than half the schools in the U.S. provide information on how to obtain birth control.  In 1999, only 59% of comprehensive sex education teachers explained that condoms can be effective in preventing HIV and STD’s, compared with 87% in 1989.  When teens become sexually active, which 60% will before graduating high school, they’ll do so unsafely.  A study by John Hopkins University shows that sexually active teens that’ve had non-abstinence sex education are more likely to use contraceptives than those who’ve only had abstinence-only sex education.  It shouldn’t be surprising that every third pregnancy involves a teenager and that half of all out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. occur among teens.  Another study shows that given a basic 75 question test on sex, most teens scored 40% or less.  Unwanted pregnancy and less contraceptive use aren’t the only results of sexual ignorance.  Two and a half million Americans are infected with gonorrhea and 800,000 are people who didn’t know any of the warning signs.  At the current rate, there could possibly not be a single teen that isn’t a parent or has a disease in the near future.

            Upon hearing these arguments against abstinence-only sex education, opponents argue that non-abstinence-only sex education encourages sex.  Simply put, they’re wrong.  Only 34% of teens receive non-abstinence-only sex education, but 60% of teens have sex.  Whether teens are informed or not, some are going to have sex.  Another argument used is that parents don’t want their children learning non-abstinence-only sex education.  Yet again, wrong.  A 1998 poll showed 87% of American parents supported non-abstinence-only sex education.  The U.S. is the biggest proponent of abstinence-only sex education, and it has the highest rate of teen pregnancy and teens are contracting HIV faster in the U.S. than in almost any other demographic.  The teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. is twice that of Canada, France, Sweden and England and ten times that of the Netherlands.  It should be noted that all those countries require non-abstinence-only sex education to be taught in school.