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Abstinence-Only Sex Education Essay

763 Words4 Pages

In 2007, the Bush administration signed off on a plan to increase federal funding for sexual education to schools for teaching abstinence-only sex education. Abstinence-positive sex ed, similar to abstinence-only in that it praises chastity, proves that refraining from sex until marriage is the best option to avoid teen pregnancy, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), unlike abstinence-only. Abstinence-only sex education programs should not be funded by the government because of its theological background, misinformative, and ineffective curriculum.
To start off, abstinence only sex education should not be funded by the government because it has a theological background. In 2004 the Department of Health and …show more content…

A study released in 2004 by Rep. Henry Waxman found that “over eighty percent of abstinence-only curricula supported by the HHS contained false, misleading, or distorted information about abortion, contraception, and gender roles” (Bruggink p.4). According to the abstinence-only curriculum, condoms are only used for protecting against unwanted pregnancy, and do not have good success rates. According to the Center for Disease Control however, that is false. “When used consistently and correctly, male latex condoms are highly effective in preventing HIV” (Workowski). Also, the federal definition of abstinence-only education states that the standard for students amongst sexual activity is to abstain from sex until marriage. If this standard remained held true, then the forty seven percent of high schoolers who have been sexually active lied (Statistics: Sexual Activity). Lastly, abstinence-only sex education’s lack of defining what sex means, leads some students to think that oral sex either is not sex at all, or a “safer sex,” because one’s chances of getting pregnant during oral sex is impossible (Leong

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