9th grade is always awkward.
Pimples, braces, and “the talk”.
Hey everyone, Julia here for DNews
Health class get super awkward in high school.
Where they talk about sex.
But A 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey indicates that more
than 47 percent of all high school students say they’ve had sex.
So sex ed isn’t going away anytime soon.
In fact, it’s actually a good thing.
One study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that students who have any kind
of sex ed wait longer to have sex, and when they do, they are more likely to use contraception.
So people want it.
One poll by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
found that 93 percent of Americans agree that sex education should be taught in schools.
But there’s a debate on what kind of sex ed is best.
Currently federal funding goes towards two main types of programs.
The vast majority of federal funding for sex ed programs, go towards what is called abstinence
only programs.
These programs teach that the only safe sex is not having it and emphasize that waiting
till marriage is the best.
When they do mention contraception, it’s typically to show how often it fails.
This type grew in popularity throughout the early 2000s.
Funding for abstinence-only programs increased from $9 million in 1997 to $176 million in
2007.
But more recently, in 2010, funding was also put towards what’s called “comprehensive”
sex ed.
This can also emphasize waiting to have sex, but it also talks about how to keep yourself
safe.
LIke how to use a condom, what birth control options are out there.
That kind of thing.
Who gets what, is really left up to the states.
And there it get super confusing.
Only 22 mandate any kind of sex education, 18 states and the District of Columbia require
that information on contraception be provided.
37 states require that information on abstinence be provided.
And even fewer—13—require that instruction be medically accurate.
So which works better?
How do we define better?
A successful sex ed program might be defined as one that lowers pregnancy and STI rates.
So a look at the literature on abstinence only programs finds some misunderstandings.
One study from researchers at the University of Washington found that “abstinence”
meant different things to adults than it meant to the students.
The intent of the abstinence programs was to set up a dichotomy with any kind of sexual
activity on one hand and total abstinence on the other.
For kids, the lines got a little blurrier.
The researchers said that students were on an escalator.
“the first step is abstinence.
Then as they begin to be aware of sex, there are other steps and choices to be made that
eventually lead to having intercourse.”
So it’s not surprising that one review by the US Department of Health and Human Services
found that none of the individual abstinence programs they reviewed had statistically significant
impacts on the rate of sexual abstinence.
So basically teens were having sex whether or not they were taught abstinence.
At the same time, teens are having sex, they aren’t using protection.
One study by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that from 2003-2007
contraception use declined.
The researchers think it might be the result of abstinence only programs which don’t
mention contraception unless it’s to talk about how often it fails.
So teens have sex, without protection, and with sex sometimes comes serious consequences.
One study in PLOS One found a link between abstinence-only programs and teen pregnancy.
Basically, states that emphasized abstinence only policies had a higher teen pregnancy
rate.
The researchers concluded that comprehensive sex and/or STI education that includes abstinence
as the best way to go was correlated with the lowest teen pregnancy rates.
And a lot of other developed nations provide comprehensive sex ed and have low rates of
teen pregnancy.
To learn more about how other countries teach sex to their teenagers, check out this great
video from TestTube.
Alright so the question is, what was your sex ed class like?
Was it all “if you have sex, you will get chlamydia and die”.?
I had horrible sex-ed.
We had someone come in a tell us that when you have sex, oxytocin is released in a woman’s
brain that binds her to her partner.
Which yeah oxytocin is called the love hormone for a reason.. but then the teacher went on
to say that oxytocin is like tape, the more you use it, the less sticky it gets.
so basically the more people you have sex with, the less you’ll get attached to them.
Which is just…
well bullshit.
Anyways tell us your story down in the comments below.
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