For the last few months I’ve been doing an outrageous amount of research for my bill for Youth in Government. I had to figure out what I wanted to change about the State of Delaware and try to create a law about it. While I was thinking about a topic I kept coming back to one issue, teen pregnancy. Delaware is 6th in the country with the highest teen pregnancy rates. After doing some more digging I found that states with Comprehensive Sexual Education have lower teen pregnancy and teen STD rates than those with other forms of Sex Education.
Comprehensive Sex Ed is taught throughout a student’s entire school career. It starts with lessons about bullying and inappropriate touching in kindergarten through second grade. Third through fifth graders will learn about the human body, body image, healthy relationships with adults and other children and identifying adults who they can talk to when they have questions about their bodies. In middle school they learn the standard Sex Ed lessons that most children are taught, with lessons about puberty, the reproductive system and different types of contraception while stressing that abstinence is the best option. During high school, teenagers learn about the importance of protecting themselves if they chose to have sex, healthy sexual and emotional relationships, pregnancy options, and symptoms and treatments for STDs.
What makes Comprehensive Sex Ed different from abstinence-only-until-marriage Sexual Education is the idea that we have accepted that some teenagers are going to have sex and that it is our job to make sure they understand how to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs. By teaching kids that abstinence is the only option, schools are leaving them open to STDs and pregnancies because they don’t know how to use or even obtain any kind of contraceptive. It’s better to be educated about the dangers of sex than to be kept in the dark and open yourself up to them. I wanted to make Comprehensive Sex Ed required in Delaware so that one day we could be like New Hampshire, with only 3% of all teenagers getting pregnant instead of our current 9%.
This is not a sponsored post. The information and statistics were gathered independently from professionals in the health and sexual education field by Sabreena to be used in her bill presented to “Legislation”.
