PERSONAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES

Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy

Abstract

Sex education should be taught in every public school possible. Sex education is a program designed to teach students the process an individual takes throughout life, including information about forming attitudes, beliefs, and values about identity, relationships, and intimacy. Most goals of sex education classes are the promotion of adult sexual health. Four main goals, according to National Guidelines Task Force, are to provide accurate information about human sexuality, to provide an opportunity for young people to develop and understand their values, attitudes, and beliefs about sexuality, to help young people develop interpersonal skills and to help young people apply responsibility of sexual relationships.

Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy

Introduction

Teen pregnancy has continuosly became a problem through the years in Britian. In 1950, the right thing to do if pregnancy occurred, was to get married. In 1955, only six percent of caucasian teenage girls were pregnant outside of marriage; today it stands at forty two percent. The teen birth rate was fifty percent higher in 1957 than it is now. In 1992, the federal goverment spent more than thirty four billion dollars on welfare for families begun by teens (Scally, 1999). Overly accepting attitudes from parents pose a problem in today's outlooks on pregnancy from teenagers. According to several studies, younger siblings of teen parents are two to six times more likely to become pregnant. People say teen pregnancy is happening because eighty three percent of the television programs include sexual content, along with radiostations. Recent studies also showed that two problems intertwine together; pregnancy and failure at school. A national longitudinal survey of youth showed that teens in the bottom twenty percent of reading and math skills are five times likely to become pregnant compared to the top twenty percent. Teens with emotional issues without support of a parent, a baby would re-create a childhood and let them care for the baby like they wanted to be cared for. Sex education at school was not effective because it would have been embarassing for the students to ask questions. Around ages thirteen through fifteen, teens begin to say that they would rather talk to a friend than to a parent. More than three quaters of teen females report that their first sexual experience was with a steady boyfriend. A study showed that two thrids of pregnant teens had been raped or sexually abused, nearly always by parents or relatives (Scally, 1999). Sixty eight percent of high school students in the UK will have had sex before they graduate. Fifty percent of the fathers of babies born to women aged fifteen through seventeen are twenty years or older, in one fifth of the cases they are at least six years older . Thirteen percent of all births in the United Kingdom are to teen girls (Lewis, 2003). Twenty nine percent of teen pregnancy end up in abortion. Fourteen percent of teen girls end up miscarrying. Facts and studies have proven that pregnancy is not just the teens ...