High Number of Teen Pregnancies!
Abstinence only sex education is irresponsible and can ruin the lives of young girls. Reality smacked one school board in Ohio last year when they discovered that 65 girls were pregnant in one high school out of a total female student body of 490. Last week the school board added responsibility (contraception?) to their abstinence promoting sex education program.
One Ohio TV station reported:
"An Ohio school board is expanding sex education following the revelation that 13 percent of one high school's female students were pregnant last year. There were 490 female students at Timken High School in 2005, and 65 were pregnant, WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported.
The new Canton school board program promotes abstinence but also will teach students who decide to have sex how to do so responsibly, bringing the city school district's health curriculum in line with national standards."
I must applaud the school board for changing their sex education policy. It is just too bad it took a crisis to force them to adopt a logical policy that was proven years ago to be much more effective than abstenance in preventing teen pregnancy.
Come on everyone, WAKEUP! Do we really want to go back to the dark ages advocated by the radical religious right? It is irresponsible and cruel to withhold sex education from girls and boys. How can we expect teens to make the right choices if we do not give them the necessary tools to do so? More information does not guarantee the right choice will always be made but it will certainly increase the odds. By restricting access to information and services that prevent pregnancy, we make young girls and women more vulnerable to the power of others. But, maybe that is the point.
Found on feministing: http://feministing.com/archives/005545.html
Full article: http://www.whiotv.com/education/9680361/detail.html
Posted by Meg
posted by Wake Up America at 9:29 AM
1 Comments:
What I don't get is how people can think that teaching "abstinence only" curricula in schools is going to teach children and teens to be sexually responsible.
As someone who has taught sex ed to middle school students (otherwise known as Raging Balls of Hormones), I think it is crazy that students asked me questions about human biology/sexuality that I knew long before entering middle school. Preaching and teaching only abstinence assumes and teaches ignorance about some of the facts about how the human body works, and kids need to know those facts before making decisions about their health--and whether or not to engage in sexual activity is one of the most important health-related decisions a person will make. Also, everyone has/had a natural curiosity about her/his body and what pleasures it can experience. To assume that kids are going to practice abstinence just because that's what a meeting of school board members decided they should be doing is pathetically naive. Kids need to be taught more than just "Don't Have Sex!"
Hopefully more school districts will follow the Ohio example, without a ton of teen pregnancies having to happen to spur the districts into action.
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