Much Ado About Abortion...

The Life vs. Choice debate is hot and heavy again. Of course this polarizing issue will never completely go away, but in the wake of a new Supreme Court Justice pick, there's been nonstop media attention on where Americans stand on abortion. According to a new Gallup Poll released this week, 51% identify as pro-life, marking the first time since 1995 (the first year Gallup started asking the question) that the scales have tipped that way. President Obama is under fire from both conservatives and liberals over whether he's going to choose a new Justice who will defend Roe v. Wade, and to what degree. And all the hubbub surrounding the pro-life President's commencement speech this weekend to a bunch of Catholic Notre Dame graduates makes it seem like he was threatening to perform an abortion right there on stage.

Yes, things can get ugly in the abortion debate, but what's missing -- again -- from this all-important discourse is any real focus on sex education. Preventing more unwanted pregnancies -- especially among teenagers -- is a win-win for society and morality (a point Obama stressed to the Notre Dame class). But the national discussion on sex education has been censored to a point where any mention of birth control near a school is treated as if a child predator were on the loose. (Anti-abortion activists have no problem parading in front of health clinics and schools with super-sized photos of aborted baby parts, but bring up birth control in a classroom and that's crossing the line?)

The fact is teenagers have sex, and they're having it sooner and more carelessly than previous generations. And that's just dumb. One inalienable benefit of time ticking by is the opportunity to take lessons from our past to better prepare for the future. Look just about anywhere in America where comprehensive sex education is included in school curriculum and you'll see fewer teen pregnancies and STDs. But in most states, contraceptives are still treated like porn. Only 69% of school districts in the United States teach sex education, and most of those that do focus exclusively on abstinence. And we know how well that works.

Of course, how we educate is important too. Go rogue -- like the U.K.'s United Health Service did by releasing a video of a school girl giving birth on a football field (filmed like it was shot from a cell phone) -- and you'll irk sex-ed naysayers and get banned by YouTube. But do it just right, like the funny/informative Midwest Teen Sex Show, and you have a chance at actually getting a safe-sex message through to teenagers (and possibly scoring a development deal with Comedy Central!).

The bottom line is, we can't afford to keep sex information from teens. The idea that hormonal adolescents will stick to a chaste moral code because their parents, church, or teen pop idols say it's the right (or supercool) thing to do is naïve at best and criminal at worst. Not educating our youth about the ticking time bombs they have in their pants is akin to sending untrained soldiers into the mountains of Afghanistan without so much as a map.

Heather Wood Rudulph is the co-founder and editor of SirensMag.com. To read the original post, click here.

Comments

[SonofLiberty1]

But not all teens are going to be sexually active.
It's just a fact period.

Yes we need more education as Bristol Palin said no kid really thinks about it.
Some do.

There used to be a time that The Chastity Belt was in vogue...
Maybe we should revisit it for boys?

[Badbone]

"The fact is teenagers have sex, and they're having it sooner and more carelessly than previous generations."

Why? Each generation is inarguably *more* educated about sex than the last. And yet, it seems to have the opposite effect, doesn't it? The more and earlier they get taught, the less it seems to help.

Maybe, instead of doing what we have been doing, we should do something different. Instead of, "Well, we know you are going to shoot heroin, so here's some education and a few clean needles" method, we should go back to what worked in the past. What's wrong with a little shame? What's wrong with teen sex being taught as something to avoid?

[odyssey58]

They're called hormones.

Teen sex drive + ignorance = unwanted pregnancy

Maybe we need fear instead of shame. I asked my teenage son to think about what it would be like to tell his girlfriend's father that he got her pregnant.

[KillTheMessenger]

Not a bad approach. It would probably be better still if he already had developed enough responsibility to know that if he makes it, he has to take care of it until the end of his natural life? Let him run around with an egg for a month. That will do.

[Badbone]

I guess teenagers didn't have hormones back say, 100 years ago, right? I mean, how else could you explain why they had such lower rates of teen pregnancy?

Self control? What's that?