New Sex Ed Study To Hurt Conservatives’ Feelings
For years conservative legislators have argued that abstinence-only sex education is the best policy, because if there’s one thing we know about teenagers, it’s that when you tell them not to do something they listen. However, today scientists have come out with information that may come as a shock (if you like to plug your ears and rock back and forth whenever someone suggests there’s a teen pregnancy problem). Researchers found that states that teach kids about contraception as well as abstinence have much lower teen birth rates than those that still insist “just say no” is cornerstone of a good sex education program.
In the first study to provide large-scale evidence on the link between sex education programs and teen pregnancy rates, University of Georgia researchers looked at teen birth and pregnancy data from 48 states and compared it to local policies on sex ed. According to EurekAlert, the researchers found that the teen pregnancy rate climbed the more states emphazied abstinence in their curriculum. The results remained the same even when the researchers took socioeconomic status, education level, access to Medicaid waivers, and ethnicity into account.