en if the mother and child survive, they often face a future of despair. Teenage mothers usually do not finish high school, are three times more likely to separate or divorce than women who delay childbearing, and have more unplanned children during their lifetime. There is a direct correlation between teenage pregnancy and poverty.
Then there is the need to inform teenagers of sexuallytransmitted diseases, something even more important today than when sex education was first introduced into the school system. AIDS, while most notably affecting the homosexual community, is now part of the heterosexual community, and, as the statistics presented above point out, adolescents are a potentially major target group.
In the 1970s, sex educators and the then potent Sex Information and Education Council strove to broaden understanding of the field as something more than "sex" education or reproductive anatomy. As a result, emphasis was placed not only on the physical but also on the social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspect of being human (Scales, 1990, p. 61). Many experts in the family planing field believe that other Western nation's teenage birth rates are lower because they recognize sexual development as a normal part of human development. America, they argue, has chosen to repress te
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