Abstinence only sex-education is not the right way to go about teaching teenagers about sexual health. Telling students not to have sex will not prevent them from having sex (no, not even if they sign a pledge). Rather than learning the facts about sexuality, students who go through abstinence-only education have less knowledge about sex, their bodies, birth control, and anything else that falls out of the category of “abstinence.”

Generally students who have abstinence-only education have just as much sex and more oral sex than students who don’t. They contract STDs more frequently and have higher instances of becoming pregnant because they were never taught about birth control or how to have a healthy sexual-relationship outside of marriage. Many students who go through abstinence-only health classes end up doing “everything but sex,” believing that this is in keeping with their pledge to wait until they are married to have sex.

In districts where sex education consists of an abstinence only program, health textbooks are censored. Chapters on AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases, marriage and dating, and birth control are often cut completely out of books. AIDS prevention assemblies and presentations have been cancelled in schools because they go against the abstinence-only program.

Proponents of abstinence only education seem to be in complete denial about what they’re talking about. Often when a child is told never to do something, their curiosity is peaked and they will do it anyway, possibly even more than if they were never told not to. Why should sex be any different?

The United States is the only country in the world that is trying an abstinence-only approach to sex education. The US also has a teen-pregnancy rate at least twice as high as Canada, and the United Kingdom, and ten times as high as in the Netherlands. Obviously something is not working. Teenagers in the United States need to have comprehensive and thorough sex education that plainly states all their birth control options (including abstinence from sex completely), educates them about their bodies, and explains how to have healthy relationships, both sexually and not, in and out of marriage.
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“Abstinence-only programs often promote alarmist misinformation about sexual health and force-feed students religious ideology that condemns homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and contraception. In doing so, they endanger students' sexual health.”

“Comprehensive, medically accurate sexuality education is becoming the exception rather than the rule; as a result, more students lack basic information. In Granite Bay, one student asked where his cervix was, and another inquired if she could become pregnant from oral sex.”

– Planned Parenthood.