Ah, the desire for sexual expression hangs in the air. College must be here.
Too bad you might not know how to follow through if you were schooled via the Indiana educational system.
If you grew up in Indiana, chances are your parents were too conservative to dive into a conversational pit about the ins and outs of sex.
Now, logic would dictate that your high school would take over and teach you everything your parents didn’t mention. However, Indiana is a state that relies heavily on the abstinence-is-the-only-answer tirade.
When a teenager is only taught abstinence, that individual isn’t going to know the consequences or realities of sex. As always, pretending the truth doesn’t exist is not effective in teaching the truth.
When schools aren’t teaching students what they should be learning, there are consequences for everyone involved. If a teenager doesn’t fully understand the risks of having sex, there can be many different outcomes.
Pregnancy is one.
Teenage pregnancy has been on the rise for the last decade, with how reality television makes it seem fashionable. However, if you’re not informed, it’s reasonable to think you won’t realize what you’re getting into.
It’s quite obvious: Lack of sexual education equates to more pregnancies and more outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases and infections.
According to Indiana Law, when sexual education is taught in schools, it’s required that abstinence from sex outside marriage has to be stressed. Not only this, but the law also states that mutual monogamy instead of marriage must be stressed as well.
Indiana’s on the abstinence train because it is one of the most conservative states in the country, and this appropriates the teaching of abstinence-only curriculum.
To quote Gov. Mike Pence, “Frankly, condoms are very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”
Pence seems to be willfully ignorant to the fact that, while not having sex is hypothetically the most effective way to prevent STDs, people are still going to have sex, and a lot of it.
So, according to his logic, denying and suppressing the basic human instinct to reproduce is more effective than educating people on how to do it safely.
As your existence proves, this ideology is inherently flawed and bound to fail. And on top of that, why not make abortions harder to access for low-income families when this methodology of pretending people won’t inevitably procreate fails? I’m getting ahead of myself.
Abstinence isn’t something that should be taught by itself or as something that is the only viable option in an age of sexual revolution and realization.
Abstinence is a method rooted in religious practices and beliefs, not science and reason. It shouldn’t be taught as a parallel to a law or forced down the young children’s throats like a horse pill.
bnbauern@indiana.edu
