To Teach Abstinence Or To Teach Contraception?
To Teach Abstinence Or To Teach Contraception
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 teenagers participating in more sexual intercourse in the 90’s more than any other decade. Abstinence should not be the only method that schools use to educate teenagers on pre-marital sex, they should be taught the alternatives to abstinence, which includes safe sex, and the potentially fatal effects of sexually transmitted diseases. This paper will analyze the use of abstinence from a functionalist perspective, which argues everything in society is done for a cause and serves as a part of the whole, with the whole being society itself.
The newspaper article used was titled “One in three schools skip talk of birth control, promote sexual abstinence”. 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...