Pros And Cons Of Abstinence-Only Education
While schools can teach the greatest majority of comprehensive sex education, there is still substantial proof that there are other outlets that need to be informing today’s youth on how to safely be sexually active. These outlets consist of the people that teens tend to know the best, their parents. Starting from a young age, parents have the greatest influence on who their kids turn out to be. They have the greatest influence in the young years, the years that tend to shape a person’s moral character. Especially during their teen years, parents need to work with teens to promote a more positive imagine and how to properly send the right message. In 2009, author Katherine Carroll wrote an article about the downfalls of abstinence only education.
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One issue that has gotten consistently worse and worse, is that of discrimination. A study executed by ‘Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health’ elaborated on a completely different aspect of the negatives associated with abstinence only education. This aspect is the fact that only teaching abstinence is a form of discrimination. This comes from the students who do decide to be sexually active and are in turn discriminated against for not doing what the teaching claim to be morally “correct”. There is a direct quote how the discrimination goes further to show how males and females view abstinence differently as it is now. “Among key differences seen between the sexes, females associated a greater number of ‘positive’ words and phrases with abstinence than did males, whereas males associated a greater number of negative words and phrases with abstinence than did females.” (Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health) When they use ‘positive words’ in this sense, only females believe that abstinence is a good thing, while males believe it to be a negative connotation. When thinking about the negatives, people tend not to think about how only teaching abstinence is not only effecting teens physically in the form of STDs and pregnancy but also physiologically. The before mentioned article goes on to talk about how females along with males tend to feel worse about themselves when they decide to become sexually active. These teens believe they have done a wrong instead of participating in a completely normal part of life and are actually in the majority rather than the
One issue that has gotten consistently worse and worse, is that of discrimination. A study executed by ‘Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health’ elaborated on a completely different aspect of the negatives associated with abstinence only education. This aspect is the fact that only teaching abstinence is a form of discrimination. This comes from the students who do decide to be sexually active and are in turn discriminated against for not doing what the teaching claim to be morally “correct”. There is a direct quote how the discrimination goes further to show how males and females view abstinence differently as it is now. “Among key differences seen between the sexes, females associated a greater number of ‘positive’ words and phrases with abstinence than did males, whereas males associated a greater number of negative words and phrases with abstinence than did females.” (Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health) When they use ‘positive words’ in this sense, only females believe that abstinence is a good thing, while males believe it to be a negative connotation. When thinking about the negatives, people tend not to think about how only teaching abstinence is not only effecting teens physically in the form of STDs and pregnancy but also physiologically. The before mentioned article goes on to talk about how females along with males tend to feel worse about themselves when they decide to become sexually active. These teens believe they have done a wrong instead of participating in a completely normal part of life and are actually in the majority rather than the