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Social Cost of Abstinence-Only Sex Education
Comprehensive Sex Education
The High Social Cost of Abstinence-Only Sex Education in the United States
The American Abstinence-Only Movement
In the United States there has been a social and legislative movement favoring abstinence-only sex education over the past 30 years (reviewed by Starkman and Rajani, 2002). Abstinence-only sex education programs do not include information on the purpose and use of contraceptives and by default promote chastity as the only method for avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Only 18 states and the District of Columbia require schools to include information on contraception in their sex education courses (Guttmacher Institute, 2011), despite a 1999 nationwide poll revealing that the majority (93%) of respondents supported instruction on such methods in school sex education programs (Starkman and Rajani, p. 616).
Part of the blame for this discrepancy can be attributed to the passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act in 1981 that provided federal funds for schools promoting abstinence-only instruction (Starkman and Rajani, p. 515). Challenges to this law have invoked the legal principle of separation of church and state, which implies that conservative religious agendas are behind the abstinence-only movement. This would explain the prevalence of fear among teachers regarding a community backlash should they attempt to teach a comprehensive sex education syllabus, which as a...
American teens are no more sexually active than their Canadian and Swedish counterparts, yet the teen pregnancy rate in America is more than twice that of these countries (Guttmacher Institute, 2011). The prevalence of STD transmissions among American teens, relative to their Canadian and Western European counterparts, is also "extremely high" (Guttmacher Institute, 2011). Fortunately, there has been a reduction by almost half in number of unmarried pregnancies among females aged 15-19 between 1990 and 2005. In contrast to the intended purpose of the Adolescent and Family Life Act of 1981, only 14% of this decline has been attributed to abstinence. The vast majority of the decline (86%) was the result of increased contraceptive use.
Independent Support for Comprehensive Sex Education
Any studies investigating the efficacy of a comprehensive school sex education program in the United States would be compromised to some extent by the dominant influence of religion on family, teachers, and the community as a whole. In China, religion is not a significant factor in their public school system. The recent sexual awakening that has accompanied economic westernization in China has resulted in a dramatic increase in teen and young adult premarital sexual…
References
Guttmacher Institute. (2011). In brief: Facts on American teen's sources of information about sex. Retrieved June 7, 2011 from http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Teen-Sex-Ed.pdf
Starkman, Naomi and Rajani, Nicole (2002). The case for comprehensive sex education. AIDS Patient Care and STDs, 16(7), 313-318.
Wang, Bo, Hertog, Sara, Meier, Ann, Lou, Chaohua, and Gao, Ersheng. (2005). The potential of comprehensive sex education in China: Findings from suburban Shanghai. International Family Planning Perspectives, 31(2), 63-72.
Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo has been a professor of Psychology at Stanford University since 1968 and is one of this nation's most famous psychological researchers. In 1970, his Stanford Prison Experiment dramatically illustrated the capacity of ordinary individuals to develop abusive and even sadistic impulses in a classic experiment that has been widely taught to undergraduate Psychology students for nearly four decades. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo was enlisted by the
As Austin suggests, "We need to do a better job of teaching our children how to live, and we need to start right now. First of all, that means that we've got to make home ec education a priority on the college level," (p. 5). I could not disagree. What Austin is arguing for is a deep societal change, one that erases from our lives the horror of fast food
Abortion trends varied widely by state as well. "Teenage abortion rates were highest in New York (41 per 1,000), New Jersey, Nevada, Delaware and Connecticut. By contrast, teenagers in South Dakota (6 per 1,000), Utah, Kentucky, Nebraska and North Dakota all had abortion rates of eight or fewer per 1,000 women aged 15 -- 19. More than half of teenage pregnancies ended in abortion in New Jersey, New York and
905). Teaching teenagers about abstinence would likely mean stronger families in the community, which by comparison would also mean that the community was stronger as well. Additional studies presented data that could also be taken into consideration concerning the causes and the effects of teenage pregnancies, both positive and negative in nature. Many of the studies found that poverty and race both had impacts on the teenage pregnancy and birth rates,
In conclusion, Watkins draws an important link between teen childbearing and poverty, which takes this discussion past morals and values and moves it into socioeconomic territory. Half of all mothers currently on welfare assistance "were teenagers when they had their first child," Watkins writes. Also, a) less than a third of teen mothers "ever finish high school"; b) the children born to teenage mothers "are twice as likely to raise
We made every possible attempt to contact as many programs as possible. This was mainly through contacting various advisors, coalitions, staff, networks and directories. There were also several telephone calls as well as reminders (in the form of both mail, and fax) to the various programs. This was however done to the ones that never returned their surveys. After initiating second mailing attempts as well as phone calls and