Teen Pregnancy Rates Are High, Awareness is Low

American teenagers have more pregnancies, births and abortions than teens in other industrialized countries. Approximately 4 million teens contract a sexually transmitted disease each year. About 820,000 girls become pregnant before they turn 20, 80 percent of which are unmarried, according to Grace Chen in her article “Teen Sex.” Teens are having sex. There is no doubt about that, so does it help that the government will not fund a sex education program teaching safe sex? 75 percent of parents say they would like for their children to be taught both abstinence and safe sex, though one third of U.S. high schools are teaching abstinence only sex education, while some others avoid the subject altogether. If sex education began in middle school and involved the topic of safe sex, the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs might be lower.

Like I said before, teens are having sex. Nothing can be done to stop it. According to the Center for Disease Control, 46.7 percent of U.S. high school students say they’ve had sex at least once during high school. Many middle school students are also admitting to engaging in oral sex.

Teaching safe sex would not be encouraging students to have sex, but rather to be safe if they do choose to so. Perhaps the rate of teen pregnancies and STDs would not be so high if teens knew how to use a condom, or better yet, what a condom is. In middle school the only sex education I got was watching disgusting slides of STDs and hearing that if I have sex I’ll get pregnant. Everyone in the school got the same classes, yet girls were still getting pregnant in middle school. The scare tactic did NOT work. Teaching safe sex will not solve the problem of teen pregnancy and STDs, but I do think it will lessen it. If teens are aware of the risks of having sex, as well as how to be safe, they are more likely to be smart about it.