medically accurate sex education
Medically Accurate Sex Education
According to the Guttmacher Institute, comprehensive programs that provide information about both abstinence and contraception can help delay the onset of sexual activity among teens, reduce their number of sexual partners and increase contraceptive use when they become sexually active. Polls show that 85% of Americans support age-appropriate, medically-accurate sex education in schools. Nevertheless, we’ve spent more than $1.5 billion on abstinence-only programs across the U.S., which prohibit any mention of family planning, contraception, or disease prevention. In Illinois, nearly 40 percent of students who learn sexual health education in schools are taught an abstinence-only curriculum.
An estimated 750,000 American teens become pregnant each year, making the U.S. teen pregnancy rate the highest among the developed world. Approximately 37,000 of these teens are in Illinois. American adolescents are also contracting sexually transmitted infections (STI) faster than any other age group, with nearly four million teens contracting an STI each year.
Providing teens and young people with the information they need to make responsible decisions is the commonsense solution to reducing unintended teen pregnancy and STIs. We need elected officials who will ensure that public schools teach responsible, age-appropriate, medically-accurate sex education.
