Sex Ed

Rough Draft

Currently the United States has the highest rate of adolescent pregnancies in the world. Roughly 93 per every 1000 sexually active adolescent females in the U.S. become pregnant (Wikipedia). Teen pregnancies and STDs are growing epidemics that obviously aren’t being addressed properly, as the rates of both in teens are on a steady rise. Introducing Sex Education into public schools will reduce the risk of potentially negative outcomes from sexual activity such as unwanted or unplanned pregnancies as well as reducing the chance of spreading sexually transmitted diseases.

Unfortunately it isn’t just sex education that we need in our public school systems; it’s a full comprehensive sex education program that actually gets the job done. The two main types of sex education that are taught throughout America are comprehensive and abstinence-only programs. The abstinence-only programs, while considered sex education, are poor examples of such. They teach the basic negatives and possible problems related with sex, and try and instill into the student’s minds that sex is bad, and that they shouldn’t engage in such activities until they’re older, married, etc. This program leaves out the preventative methods of how to have safe sex, because it tries to convince students that they shouldn’t be doing it at all. Although students do have sex, and when they do they’re unprepared. Comprehensive sex education is the other program taught regularly, although not regularly or well enough in most cases, throughout our country. It on the other hand tries to teach students about sex, including the negative side affects as well as how to prevent them.