Persuasive Essay On Sex Education

Although sex education is important, many students leave the classes with a warped view of sexuality and without a good understanding of safe-sex practices and how to properly use contraception. In most sex education programs, teenage students only learn that they should not have sex until they are married. This type of program has gained popularity in public schools across the nation because of a law giving nearly half of a billion dollars to schools that agree to teach the programs. Abstinence-only programs intend to persuade young people to wait until marriage before engaging in sexual activity, but they are not achieving this goal and are blemished by the twisted and biased view that they promote. The United States government

A study of programs promoting abstinence was released by the United States Department of Health and Human Services in 2007. The study, involving more than 2000 students, was funded by the federal government. The creators uncovered that “findings from this student provide no evidence that abstinence programs implemented in upper elementary and middle schools are effective in reducing the rate of teen sexual activity” (“Impacts”). They concluded that the “findings indicate that youth in the abstinence-only programs were no more likely” than students not in abstinence-only programs “to have abstained from sex” (“Impacts”). Furthermore, among the students in the study who said they engaged in sex, they had “similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age” (“Impacts”). It would appear that pupils did not gain from all of the effort and the nearly half of a billion taxpayer dollars that have been put into this outrageous strategy. Another study conducted at Columbia University by Peter Bearman indicates that “88 percent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married” (Altman). Dr. Bearman also says that by telling teenagers “to ‘just say no’, without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk of sexually transmitted diseases” (Altman). Dr. Paige S. Herweck is a doctor who contributed to a report on teen sexual activity by the American Academy of Pediatrics. She reported that “teaching abstinence but not birth control makes it more likely that once teenagers initiate sexual activity, they will have unsafe sex and contract sexually transmitted diseases” (“Doctors Slam Abstinence”). Teenagers are taught to “just say no” to sex in programs that promote abstinence. They are not taught the facts that are necessary for