Why Do Schools Teach Abstinence In Schools

The act of abstinence is taught by many teachers in American high schools nowadays as the correct and only way to educate teenagers on pre-marital sex, but does this education method actually benefit students or is it sending them a bad message? To me, I believe that schools, which are teaching abstinence as the only way to approach pre-marital sex send the wrong message to teenagers because contraception is also a vital part of the education because not everybody will want to take part in abstinence. Nowadays, teenagers are more exposed to sex on mass media such as the radio, television, the Internet and many other sources. There are myriads of advertisements that contain sexual innuendos and subliminal sexual messages and this has led to

Written by a member of the associate press in Washington, This article as the title suggests, discusses how one out of three American schools do not even bother to teach anything about contraception and the prevention of pregnancy, whereas they are taught that abstinence is the only way to prevent pregnancy. Talks of birth control, pregnancy and transmission of sexually transmitted diseases are left out except to talk about its shortcomings. The people who promote abstinence teachings are mainly the conservative and religious groups. The abstinence only programs seem to be most prevalent in the southern states and seem to be not very common in the northeast and there is a mandate by the American government saying that fifteen states require schools to teach abstinence until marriage while thirteen states require lessons about contraception and abstinence combined. These groups say that if abstinence is taught, a message saying that pre-marital sex is acceptable in society and wouldn’t be considered deviant. The remaining two thirds of schools in the United States, which educate with both abstinence and contraception according to the article teach that abstinence is the preferred option but do go on to talk about how to prevent pregnancies if one does decide to engage in sexual intercourse. The newspaper article goes on to say that most American citizens are in support of programs that promote both abstinence and contraception taught together but it is still important for society to send teens a message that abstinence is the most conventional method. Sixty six percent of teenagers said that they have had sex by the time they graduated from high school. This goes to show that teenagers have been exposed to more sex in their everyday lives and sex before marriage is considered harmless by today’s society as opposed to what the norm was twenty years