Real sex education

This Valentine’s Day, Democratic politicians reintroduced The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, which would expand comprehensive sex education in schools and ensure access to medically accurate and age-appropriate materials. Two of our state representatives, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., are listed as co-sponsors of this act.

This legislation would ensure students are only given correct information about birth control, HIV transmission and ways to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

Just as crucially, this act would make certain that federal funding only goes toward programs with language that’s inclusive for all genders and sexual orientations.

This is an incredibly important piece of legislation. Evidence uniformly shows that mandating these types of programs—as opposed to abstinence-only programs—has huge benefits in both the short- and the long-term.

It’s good timing: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just declared the STD problem in our country an “ongoing and severe epidemic.”

According to the CDC, the U.S. has the highest STD transmission rates of any industrialized country. While persons in their teens and early-20s comprise only a quarter of the country’s sexually active population, they still face the highest rates of STD transmission, accounting for nearly half of all STDs. Thirteen to 24-year-olds account for a quarter of the new cases of HIV recorded annually.

The human papillomavirus is one of the main STDs that shows up in these teenagers; its most common strains are highly preventable with the HPV vaccination, which protects against four strains of HPV and is currently available for both genders. While we have the ability with this vaccine to prevent HPV-related cancers, only a small percentage of girls and boys are receiving the vaccine, thanks in large part to right-wing hysteria.

Some of the other STDs showing up in these adolescents could also be treated if teenagers would simply get tested more often, allowing them to realize they have an STD and thus decreasing the chances of spreading the disease to other partners. Unfortunately, few teenagers seem to know how to get regularly tested, mostly because of the lack of comprehensive sex education.

The New Morning Foundation recently conducted a study of sexual education programs in South Carolina, discovering that few programs actually included information about preventative measures like condoms or birth control. It found that a number of programs relied on “abstinence until marriage” education (which has repeatedly proven widely ineffective), and included outdated language regarding gender roles, as well as a whole slew of misinformation. The result: The state has a high rate of STD transmission and a high rate of teen pregnancy.

This is not to single out South Carolina.

Unfortunately, many states that rely on conservative politicians to dictate their sexual education policies share this problem. In West Virginia, a 2011 WV FREE report indicates that while about half of the teenage population is sexually active, almost 75 percent of these sexually active teens aren’t using any form of birth control whatsoever. A high number of these teenagers admitted they didn’t actually know how to prevent HIV.

A Democratic state representative in Alabama is currently fighting to repeal a sex education law that requires teaching students that homosexuality is illegal and that the only acceptable social standard is abstinence until marriage.

In one part of California, students were actually told they could spread HIV through kissing but that the best way to avoid STD transmission was to, among other things, get plenty of rest. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently suing this
school district.

Luckily, the rate of teen pregnancy across the country is actually going down.

Although the U.S. rate is still among the highest for any developed country, it hit record lows this year. A researcher who studies teen pregnancy suggested this might have something to do with increased access to birth control, including longer-term methods like intrauterine devices.

Some conservative politicians disagree; they believe the economy is motivating fewer teenagers to want to become parents. While I’m not saying that teenagers can’t be wonderful parents if they so choose, I’m advocating for the prevention of unintended pregnancy in teenagers, and those conservative politicians are wrong. The majority of teen pregnancies are still unintended, and we pay the price.

Unintended pregnancy costs U.S. taxpayers about $11 billion a year—a much higher cost than providing birth control pills to teenagers who want them, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Luckily, some states have made a lot of progress in this area.

Advocates for Youth states that approximately 400 middle and high schools in this country provide access to condoms to students in their schools (still not a high enough number), but most of these schools also require a student to interact with an adult intermediary—usually a nurse or school counselor—prior to obtaining condoms.

Schools in Philadelphia are trying a different approach. On Jan. 22, high schools with the highest rates of STD transmission installed free condom vending machines. Students can now obtain condoms without anyone’s knowledge. While we eagerly await the results of this pilot program, results are already coming in for another program in New York City. It’s becoming clear that access to preventative methods helps students prevent the spread of STDs and unintended pregnancies. What a novel idea!

In New York City, teenagers in public schools now have access to free birth control and emergency contraception in their schools. The numbers here are truly impressive. With increased comprehensive sex education, the percentage of sexual activity these teenagers engaged in dropped by 27 percent.

As reported by Jezebel, a large number of girls now report that they were already using the birth control pill or another longer-term form of birth control prior to the first time they had sex. There were 5,735 fewer pregnancies than there were 10 years prior, and the average number of teen pregnancies in the city dropped from 98.8 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage girls to 72.6 pregnancies for every 1,000 female students.

In other words, giving adolescents access to free birth control and comprehensive sex education yields significant positive results. This seems like a no-brainer, and with the passage of The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, there are high hopes that the results we see in New York could be replicated elsewhere.