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Teaching Abstinence in Sex Education

nswer the four questions above must also consider the AIDS education question.

Shapiro (1993) presents a generalistic overview of the state of current thinking with regard to abstinence: he answers the question, "Why has the abstinence approach to sex education gained ground in the 1990s?":

Most adults fall into opposing camps on exactly which of the facts of life to teach. The "throw in the towel" crowd concedes, with value-free resignation, that having sex is normative teen behavior and the most that adults can do is teach young people how sperm meets egg, toss out loads of condoms, and hope for the best. Meanwhile the "stop it" forces call for scaring teens into premarital chastity with horror stories of shame and disease. Neither solution, however, works very well with today's sophisticated teenagers. That is clear from teen birthrates. After falling for more than a decade, they began climbing rapidly in the late 1980s and are now [1993] at their highest levels since the early 1970s--before the widespread availability of birth control and abortion ... Now a third way of thinking has begun to emerge among sex educators and public health workers that combines the abstemious and lenient approaches and stresses reaching younger children. (p. 56)

The developments of the past fifteen years have not helped build concensus regarding sex education, and, in particular, abstinence. As the above quotation illustrates, when AIDS brought sex education to a more prominent position in the public schools in the late 1980s, birthrates began climbing rapidly. Of course, increasing birthrate is not necessarily indicative of teenage sex or unsafe sex. Even so, groups are now more splintered than ever over the question of sex education. The most clear-headed among educators take a middle ground (teach abstinence along with condom use) while conservatives urge teens to "pet your dog, not your date" (Shapiro, 1993, p. 56). The quest...

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Teaching Abstinence in Sex Education. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:33, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692084.html