Sex Ed Anna Quindlen Analysis

Anna Quindlen is one of many talents, she is a journalist and a writer, as well as the recipient for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Quindlen began her career at the New York Post and soon after became a columnist for the New York Times. In her essay, "Sex Ed", Quindlen begins her essay by introducing readers back into a time in which she had the opportunity to sit amongst several pregnant adolescent girls from an indigent neighborhood in New York City at a family planning clinic, she tells readers that these adolescents would soon all give birth. Soon after the day at the clinic, she visited a suburban high school in which most of the girls there were well off, and also pregnant, except they would not give birth to the drifting fetus …show more content…
Quindlen doesn’t condemn the girls for ending up pregnant or having sex, she actually recalls her adolescent years in which nothing seemed to matter more than having sex, this wasn’t a personal view of hers, but a view held by her classmates too, girl or boy. She argues for something more political, something like sex education. However, It wasn’t the sex education the state was or wasn’t providing, but where the sex education was coming from, Quindlen argues that it should be coming from the family more than anything. However, one must take into consideration that family oriented sex education isn’t simply all adolescents need to prevent pregnancy at an early age, in fact it’s not even the beginning of the problem. One should be arguing to find the answers as to why adolescence today are having unprotected sex at the rates in which they do, and it may be because they simply must in order to feel …show more content…
Nevertheless it is clear that the adolescents Quindlen met with knew a thing or two about sex and human sexuality. “ I sat around a Formica table with a half-dozen sixteen-year-old girls and listened with some amazement as they showed off their knowledge of human sexuality. They knew how long sperm lived inside the body, how many women out of a hundred using a diaphragm were statistically likely to get pregnant and the medical term for the mouth of the cervix” (198). Quindlen stated. It’s more than likely that the adolescents learned these details from a school sex education program in comparison to a family taught one, because chances are a school sex education program will be much more extensive than a family taught one. The knowledge the adolescents displayed is distinctly correct and helps to point out that the girls are listening to what they’re being taught. I’ve had my share of sex education classes and I have also had a few talks with my parents about sex, but when it came down to it, what I wanted was more important than any fact they had given me, and that’s what comes with being an