Teens are at Risk for STIs, Unintended Pregnancy and HIV
Regardless of when they choose to initiate sexual activity, all young people must be prepared to become sexually healthy adults and provided with the knowledge and skills necessary to avoid HIV, other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unintended pregnancy.
U.S. adolescents face considerable risks to their reproductive health. They have the highest age-specific risk for many STIs and the United States continues to lead the developed world in the rate of adolescent pregnancy. In fact, U.S. teen pregnancy and teen birth rates are the second highest among 46 countries in the developed world.
Data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the 2000 U.S. Census indicate a considerable gap between the median age at first intercourse of 17 years, and the median age at first marriage of 25 in women and 27 in men. Such demographic realities raise serious questions about the feasibility of programs that promote abstinence-only-until-marriage as a universal sexuality education strategy.
Further demonstrating the need for comprehensive sex education is the fact that, according to the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, 46.9 percent of high school students had ever had sexual intercourse. Data also showed that every year there are approximately 831,000 pregnancies among women aged 15 to 19 years, about 9.1 million cases of STIs among persons aged 15 to 24 years, and an estimated 4,842 cases of HIV/AIDS among persons aged 15 to 24 years.
These numbers demonstrate that limiting students’ sexuality education to abstinence-only programs fails to arm adolescents with accurate and sufficient knowledge to make informed decisions and keep themselves safe.
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Some may take these scary statistics and turn them into a reason to promote abstinence-only sex education, but they actually show the need not to promote it. You can't shelter every high school student, and then send them off to college not knowing how to protect themselves. They would be completely overwhelmed. The breakout of pregnancy and diseases would skyrocket because these kids wouldn't know what to do with themselves. Students all need to know how to be protected not how to be abstinent.
I agree with this. If kids are not taught the safe way, who knows what this world will become. Everyone would end up with a disease or a lot more babies. Even though some kids will pertake in the abstinence-only path, others will not. The ones that don't should know how to keep themselves healthy. Teaching the safe way would most likely lower the rate of unintended teen pregnancy.
Although in a perfect world, abstinence only could be taught and all high school kids would listen. This is not even close to the case, however. More and more teens are becoming sexually active at a younger and younger age. They must be taught about the risks and responsibilities of making these choices. These teens must know that if they are not careful they could get an STI or become pregnant. They also need to be taught to practice safe-sex, if they are choosing to avoid the abstinence only way of life. Teaching abstinence only is just not a practical way of approaching this situation.
So basically, even if a teen has decided not to engage in sexual activity until after marriage, they should be informed of the DANGERS in partaking in such an activity and should know how to protect themselves. Such as having their partner tested for sexually transmitted diseases and knowing how to prevent the spread of such etc.