I wrote this last year. I thought I'd share again and ask for your thoughts!
Disclaimer: This is what I believe as far as MY children are concerned. If you want your 14 year old son to have condoms then YOU can buy them. If you want your 12 year old daughter to have access to birth control pills then YOU take her to the doctor. Please don't spend my tax dollars on something that I don't believe in.
Every time sex education gets brought up I hear the same tune, “Kids are going to have sex so we may as well teach them to be safe.” I always want to scream, “It doesn't have to be that way!” Teenagers are going to THINK about having sex. It's a biological certainty. When puberty sets in and hormones start raging sex is going to come up in the child's mind. It doesn't help that children are hyper sexualized today. With television shows that glamorize sex (Glee, The Secret Life of the American Teenager), music and singers that are all about sex, and movies that give out the “sex is okay if you're in love” message kids are set up for failure! If you hand that same sex obsessed child a condom and show them how to “be safe” of course they're going to have sex!
Let's talk about television for a minute. I recently wrote a blog about the sexual message of an episode of Glee. The show The Secret Life of the American teenager glamorizes teen sex and pregnancy. Yes, one of the characters got pregnant. However, the message is “she didn't use protection and that's why she got pregnant.” Add that her post pregnancy life has been very easy and the message is clear: Use protection, but if you don't it's not that bad. What about the movie that shows the story of the STD made it's way around school because of a promiscuous male?
She's Too Young Oh, you missed that one? Probably because it was a Lifetime Original Movie and most teenagers don't watch that channel.
What about the claims that abstinence only education doesn't work? There are numerous studies that say that the percentage of children having sex doesn't change no matter what you teach them. Not so much:
Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), says bad public policy is to blame for the STD epidemic. "The funding of graphic sex-ed that encourages kids to be sexually active is a serious problem," She maintains. "We also have the FDA's decision to allow the morning after pill to be available without a prescription."
Wright says that decision is keeping many women from getting regular screening for STDs. "...women are not going to their doctor's to get screened for sexually transmitted diseases," she clarifies. "Instead they're able to go to a local pharmacy and pick up a drug that is actually not that effective – even at preventing pregnancy."
What happens is girls have unprotected sex, head down to the local pharmacy or Planned Parenthood, pick up Plan B and never get screened for STDs. These same girls continue having sex, possibly unprotected because they can just go grab the pill again, and spread anything they caught.
The latest Centers for Disease Control study on teen birth rates in the U.S. showed a slight uptick for the year 2006. Mississippi led the nation in the percentage of teens giving birth, while New Hampshire had the fewest.
But critics of abstinence education are using the study to show that those types of educational programs are not working. Bryan Fischer, executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance disagrees, saying ten times the amount of money is spent on condom-based sex education than is spent on abstinence education.
This was inspiring!
The classes did not focus on a message of saving sex until marriage or "disparage condom use." Instead, the classes "involved assignments to help sixth- and seventh graders see the drawbacks to sexual activity at their age."
Researchers surveyed the students again two years later and found that about one-third of those who had the abstinence-only classes said they had engaged in sex compared to about half of the students from the other three classes.
Here's where we get down to just my opinion. Proper abstinence only education shouldn't just say, “Wait until marriage. Here are the bad things that can happen. Just say no.” I've been there. “Just say no” doesn't work if you're already naked. We need to teach these kids how to avoid the situation all together, not just how to get out of it. We need to teach them the warning signs that things are going too far, not just what happens when you are already there. We need to teach them the emotional effects of sex outside of marriage, not just the physical effects. We should be teaching these sexualized youth that their bodies have VALUE and that they need to take pride in saving themselves. Being a virgin shouldn't be something that causes shame! In a world where sex is thrown at you at every turn having the strength to say, “I'm different” should be valued.
I'll be straight with you. (Before I get a million comments from “friends” that scream I'm a hypocrite) I didn't wait. I wasn't strong enough. But, I didn't get the right message. I got the first message. I was told, “Just say no.” I didn't get the right tools. And, I was a depressed teenager with self esteem issues. It happened and it shouldn't have. By then I only valued myself for my body and what I could do with it. I want my children to love themselves more than I loved myself!
Don't give up on abstinence!
