One out of every eight teenagers is pregnant, according to The Times Mirror Company.
That is a problem.
So how can eradicating sexuality education from the public schools even be an issue?
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the pregnancy rate for teenagers 15-19 has decreased 22 percent from 1990 to 2000.
In fact, in 2001, birth rates fell to a record low. But 1 million pregnant teenagers a year is still not good enough.
Although the teen pregnancy rate has decreased in the past decade, the United States still has the highest rate than that of any industrialized nation.
In America, sex is a taboo topic. With sex education opponents like President George Bush, intelligent discussions about sex will decrease while reckless sexual activities increase.
Contrary to popular belief, sex education covers a variety of topics aside from human sexuality.
According to the Sexuality Education and Information Council of the U.S. Report, some of the main goals of sex education are: developing and understanding values, attitudes and beliefs about sexuality, helping young people develop interpersonal skills, and encouraging responsibility regarding sexual relationships, including addressing abstinence, resisting pressures to become prematurely involved in sexual intercourse, and encouraging the use of contraception and other sexual health measures.
Sex education is not a means to move responsibility from the parents to the government.
It is simply a means for students to freely express their thoughts and ideas.
More importantly they can receive correct information from an adult who is not afraid to share it.
Granted, talking about sex is difficult. Most parents would prefer if they were the chief initiators of conversations about sex, intimacy and relationships, but they find it difficult to do.
In that case, the next best thing is for children to learn from educated adults in an environment where they can speak their minds without pressure.
Obviously, the Christian Bush administration would rather this generation learn about sex from friends, music, television, books and advertisements.
They obviously trust these sources to be positive and accurate, more so than the educational system. Sad indeed.
Government officials have lost their minds if they think eliminating the lines of communication will actually benefit our children.
Do AIDS, STDs or illegal abortions benefit our children?
It’s doubtful that the middle and high school students who have experienced them already feel that way.
Sex education may not have prevented these unfortunate circumstances, but if teenagers were educated the statistics might not be so high.
Bush may feel that ‘abstinence-only until marriage’ programs may have eliminated these statistics but there is no scientific evidence that these programs work.
However, President Bush proposed to raise federal spending on abstinence-only education to $135 million.
That money could be used to educate and train teachers.
Bush must believe that teaching children about sex and providing them with contraception means they are being taught to have sex.
If that’s the case, swimming lessons should be banned, after all children will drown if they are taught to swim.
What about gun safety? That definitely needs to go because if people know gun safety then they’ll go around shooting each other.
Banning swimming lessons and the refusal to practice gun safety are about as dangerous as Bush’s theory to tell our students to only practice abstinence.
Christian Bush needs to take his theory to church, because it won’t work in the classroom.
-Danielle Wright for the Editorial Board.