Everyone remembers the time of the year when they taught Sex Ed in high school. The time of the year when your health teacher or gym teacher turned off the lights and showed the class a poorly made Powerpoint presentation full of the names of STDs/STIs along with photos of what these infections look like, teaching students that this is what happens when you have too many sexual partners. Then, they proceeded to remind you how easy it is to get pregnant, and telling the class about all of the other complications that come with sex. At the end of the lesson, the teacher stood up, and sternly stated, “Don’t have sex, it’s bad for you.” For me, this was terrifying. I had convinced myself that sex was something I didn’t want to participate in, and if I did, I was more than definitely going to end up pregnant or with some disease.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever experienced this abstinence-only, fear-mongering version of Sex Ed. As I’ve grown up, I started to realize that I never actually learned anything in these classes. They tried to scare a classroom full of teenagers into not experimenting with sex and not helping them understand what sexuality is and the importance of it. I remember one particular time in my “Abstinence Class” (they didn’t even try to cover it up in Alabama), one student raised their hand and asked the teacher why we were being told that sex is so dangerous, even though we had things like condoms. This seemed like a valid question to the rest of us, but instead of getting an honest answer from our instructor, she simply said, “Well, my point here is if you have sex before you’re married, you’re a bad person.”

Teenagers should not be taught this fear and shame when it comes to sex. Exploring who you are as a sexual being is one of the most important things a person learns during puberty and scaring young people into not finding themselves in this manner is just plain wrong. Abstinence-only sex education is not only wrong because of the way it handles how it teaches teens about sex, but it isn’t effective. Generally speaking, these programs that the government keeps pouring its money into don’t even touch on the most basic topics that a sex education course should be teaching, including puberty, sexual health, and reproductive anatomy (SIECUS). In fact, among teens aged 18-19 years old, 41% of them reported that they know little to nothing about condoms, and fewer male teens have received information on contraception than girls.

This causes confusion to teens, and leads them to try to understand them on their own, and through this ignorant discovery, they can make many life changing mistakes, even though many people who are advocates for abstinence-only education claim that these programs are the reason for the decline in teen pregnancy. A federal study on abstinence-only education conducted in 2007 found that these programs had no effect on the rate of sexual abstinence in teens. Along with this, the U.S. leads the world in teen pregnancy and birth rates, and teens that are taught abstinence only sexual education are more likely to experience pregnancy due to their lack of knowledge. On top of these facts, approximately nine million new STIs occur among teens and young adults in the United States because of the lack of education on contraception.

Comprehensive sexual education courses are what we need to be teaching the young adults of America.These classes can provide teens with so much vital information that they need during puberty, such as sexual health, reproductive anatomy, human sexuality, gender identity, contraception (including condoms and birth control), human development, disease prevention, and information on maintaining healthy relationships. Programs like this will reduce teen pregnancy and the rate at which young adults contract STIs. Otherwise, we are dooming them to going into this world making mistakes that could drastically change their lives forever.