Abstinence-only teaches these (hormonal) teenagers basically that they should wait until marriage to have sex, condoms are not effective all the time in preventing anything (duh but even the effectiveness of condoms is downplayed to scare them into not wanting to use them so they "wait") and that they shouldn't even masturbate -- and, obviously, to wait until marriage to have sex.
Okay.
So. I don't understand what the big deal is.
Why are we still trying to tell kids to wait until marriage to have sex?
Is it preferred? Yes. Is it realistic? Absolutely not.
Who tells a bunch of teenagers that, not only can they NOT have sex, but they can't masturbate either? It's just completely unnecessarily.
Do you know how many people I know who waited until marriage to have sex? None. Not one single person. I don't have habitually slutty friends (haha!). These aren't back alley prostitutes I'm talking about here. All my friends are just normal people and (most) normal people don't always wait until marriage to have sex.
I can't believe these antiquated ideals are still being pushed on modern-day teenagers -- who see more sex in an hour of network television than any person needs, who have access to SO MUCH sex and information. Why are we pushing this on our children?
As parents, we have to be one-step ahead of our children if we want to prepare them for anything and abstinence-only is a step backwards. Far, far backwards.
Obviously it's not working for Texas, since Texas has the 3rd highest teen birth rate (and the 2nd highest REPEAT teen pregnancies) in the nation.
Yes, REPEAT teen pregnancies.
I can't even get INTO the amount of CHILDREN (ages 10-15) that are contracting STDs in this country. It's enough to make me want to throw up.
Clearly something isn't working.
I don't even want to blame the schools for this either. It's not for the school to say whether a student should be abstinent or not. Sex education should be teaching about all the different kinds of contraceptives, STDs, basic knowledge about sex, etc. without anyone's opinion on whether or not someone should wait until marriage. If people want to claim that marriage is a religious tradition, then they shouldn't even be pushing marriage on teenagers in schools either. Separation of church and state, people.
It's the school boards and the people who decide these things that really get me.
The same people who don't want to teach their kids about sex are going to be the parents of the kids that I don't want hanging around my kids -- who will be more educated about things than those kids and therefore filling my children's head with all kind of bullcrap that isn't true.
They will be the same parents whose kids either get pregnant or contract an oral STD (because that isn't sex, is it? (sarcasm)) or God-knows-what.
Hey, how about we actually prepare our children for something? Like, life.
We're not raising children, we're raising adults (and I'm pretty sure adults have sex and oftentimes contract STDs).
We should prepare them for everything, not just the parts of life that doesn't make us uncomfortable to talk about.
I'm climbing off my soapbox now.
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