Teen pregnancies hit home base when visiting with many parents or teens. In my situation, a friend of mine at the age of fifteen became pregnant from an older individual out of high school already. It was as though the world came to an end for the two of us and all our plans. We had plans of all the party life we would have while rooming together in college. Needless to say, our dreams came crashing down around us. Would it have helped if we would have been taught reality-based sex education instead of abstinence in our school or should we have been taught both? I don?t know the answer pertaining to her pregnancy. Maybe she would have still engaged in pre-marital sex but would have protected herself with some form of birth control. I feel that in order to properly educate teens against the serious consequences of pre-marital sex, reality-based and abstinence education needs to be taught in school systems instead of just abstinence to help prevent teen pregnancies.
English: Flowchart displaying federal funding for ...
18th-century-anti-sex-education
English: A poster promoting the U.S. military's WW...Despite the decline in teenage pregnancies, the United States continues to have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world. Society needs to take a look at the sex education teens receive, especially when one considers that of approximately 950,000 teenage pregnancies that occur each year, more than 3 in 4 are unintended (?Sexuality?). In my Catholic oriented community and school, the instructor focused on abstinence barely touching on the consequences of sex. Sex education was included in our health and physical education class and was about self-respect, self worth, self-image, and to portray our bodies as a temple of God. As students, we ignored her instructions. What did she know? At that age we felt like we knew everything. We figured sex would do no...