Schools Sex Ed

The good news is that the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. is the lowest it's been since the early 70's, primarily due to teens' increased and improved use of birth control. The bad news is that one million U.S. teens still get pregnant each year, and 78 percent of those pregnancies are unintended. The fact is that most young people in the United States begin having sex in their teens and they need honest and straightforward information about sex in order to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy. Obvious, right? Well apparently not to President Bush, who asked Congress for a 33% increase in funding for "abstinence-only" sex education, which would forbid teachers to talk about how contraception works or where to get it. Abstinence-only programs keep teens in the dark about sex; they have not been proven to delay or reduce sexual activity; and they fail to provide accurate information about preventing pregnancy and disease. Expecting to convince 90 percent of our nation to ignore their sexuality until they are bound in wedlock by strategically eliminating sex-ed in public schools is absurd. Our government is foolish in presuming that our nation will remain celibate when 90 percent of our population is engaging in intercourse before marriage. Eighty-five percent of voters believe students need "age-appropriate information" on contraception and STI prevention, two thirds of parents believe sex education will delay sexually activity, and nine of 10 public school teachers believe we must inform students about contraception. Sex can be our friend or our foe; we can continue to fight sex, or we can invite sex in for a cup of tea and a game of Scrabble. This alone beckons for a shift in the way we perceive sex in our society, denial will only spawn backlash. But as stated earlier Bush's administration is getting in the way of that. The United States has the highest pregnancy and abortion rates in the West, one in four sexually active teens, (3 to 4 million) will be infected with a sexually transmitted infection this year. Teen birth rate has fallen from 11th nationwide in 1991 to 21st in 2002, according to the California Wellness Foundation. Studies show that balanced programs that promote both abstinence and safer sex are most effective and allow young people to make responsible choices. California is the only state that refuses to accept federal sex-education money, which requires public schools to teach only sexual abstinence and avoid providing information on contraception. As a nation we must move sex out of the basement and back seats and into classrooms and dinner conversations. We are letting Britney Spears play the sex-ed substitute teacher while our government pretends our teens do not have sex. tion, on the other hand, teaches that sexuality is healthy, normal part of human being. In California, teen birth rate has dropped more than 40 percent over the last decade.