We shouldn’t abstain from sex ed

OK class, today we’re going to be talking about the differences between men and women during sex. Men are like microwaves, they ‘heat up’ quickly and finish just the same. Women, on the other hand, are like crock pots. They take a while to heat up and take hours to finish. 

No joke, that’s what my middle school nurse told me and my fellow classmates about sex. 

We weren’t given any context as to what that meant, it was all up to us to figure it out using our own devices.  

That’s because we were raised during the time of abstinence-only sex education.  

It started in the 80s’ when Congress passed the Adolescence Family Life Act (AFLA). It was designed to encourage young people to wait until marriage while also providing support to pregnant and parenting teens.  

By 2000, there were three abstinence-only programs created by the Federal government that encouraged states to teach abstinence-only programs for grant money.  

These federally funded programs existed in some form until 2010 when President Obama put an end to them.  

However, they still haunted schools across the country and were the continued basis for sex education programs. 

That was exactly what I was taught in high school. 

Basically, my school nurse wanted to scare the living hell out of us by telling us all the things that would happen to us if we had sex before marriage, you know, STDs, pregnancy, mental health problems and an inevitable death without truly telling us about other birth control options. We were then sent into the world of high school under the guise that we would be OK.  

Except we weren’t. The whole ‘figuring things out for ourselves’ tactic ended up backfiring and creating big problems.  

Teen pregnancies, STD cases and misinformation filled high schools around the country. In my high school, my graduating class was the only class to reach graduation without a teen pregnancy since 2014, and every class that followed mine had at least one pregnancy and countless pregnancy scares.  

Taking an abstinence-only approach to teaching sex education isn’t effective because there is no real education involved.   

According to stuvoice.org, only 17 states require sex education to be scientifically accurate. That means that the things we are being taught could be wrong.  

And that was proven. 

A study done on those federal grant programs in 2004 by Rep. Henry A. Waxman found that “two-thirds of the abstinence-only education curricula studied contained incorrect scientific information regarding condom failure, sexually transmitted diseases, the health consequences of abortions, and mental health” according to NCAC.org.  

Now, things have gotten a little better over the last couple of years as organizations and medical studies preach comprehensive sex ed. But it’s still not enough.  

Sex ed needs to cover every aspect of sex, including the uncomfortable bits, and let students make their own decisions about what is right for them. 

It needs to teach students about sex that also isn’t heteronormative. That way, students who belong to the LGBTQ+ community are getting a fair education as well.  

I understand that abstinence looks good on paper, but it’s not working. We can’t leave it up to porn, the internet or religious threats any longer to teach teenagers how to practice safe sex, and the very real consequences that occur without it.