United States has the Highest Rate of Teenage Pregnancies

We are number one in the world for teenage pregnancy, about 500,000 births per year from girls under twenty. Second in the statistic is Poland, who only has about 30,000 teenage births in a year. When the topic of sex arises, people become uncomfortable because it is a subject that is thought of as personal and secretive. However, people aren’t only uncomfortable with the subject because of it being taboo, people try to avoid the subject because they aren’t always informed correctly about it and don’t have a way to learn about it, excluding the internet which doesn’t always have accurate material, and lack general knowledge of sex. Education about sex and its surrounding topics such as STI’s and prevention should be medically accurate, determined by a panel of well-educated doctors specializing in the subject, and be taught and readily available to adolescents. Lack of sexual education in schools is leading to less knowledgeable adolescents because of inaccurate information being publically distributed, abstinence-only programs leave out crucial information needed by all adolescents, and even when taught in schools accurately, teenagers can still get looked down upon for possessing the awareness of the taboo subject.
Medically accurate information is not always given to adolescents in the schools that do teach sexual education. Nineteen of the fifty states in the US require medically accurate information to be supplied to these classes, and even some of the medically accurate information can vary from state to state depending on what said state defines ‘medically accurate’ (“StatePolicies”). If we are giving less than half of the country’s population of students medically accurate information, that might not even be truly accur...

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...d express and emphasize that it is a natural and ordinary occurrence in an adult and sometimes a teenager’s life.
Schools are subjugating young adults when they are not teaching them vital and accurate information that they will need soon, or later, in their life. By choosing to edit information, or not include it at all, they are denying teens of knowledge that will be needed to make choices. Shaming students when they include themselves in activities that some may not approve of is immature and needs to be put to a stop. Someone else that chooses and consents to sexual activity and is in no way affecting your life, should be of no worry to you because their sexual involvement is no business of yours. There needs to be a widespread of accurate information that is available to teenagers at a correct age appropriateness with a part of the social acceptance of sex.