American Sex Education Analysis

Thousands of people protested all throughout the country; the civil society was enraged at the prospect of the approval of law 61, which intended to make a sexual education curriculum compulsory to all Panamanian students. What is the reason behind this law? Basically, to decrease the rate of teenage pregnancies, STDs, and defend a somewhat progressive look on polemic matters as gender identity and gender roles. This was the spark that ignited and kept these protests on for a long time. In Panama, just last year, more than ten thousand teenagers became pregnant, leading to high rates of school dropouts and increasing poverty in certain areas of the country. In her article “Society Divided by Sexual Education Program,” journalist Rosalia Simmons …show more content…
In this nation, each state has the decision to either implement a law for a sex program or not, as well as to what subjects the program would focus on. There tends to be two predominant focuses on American sex education: abstinence-only and comprehensive (Smothers). Abstinence-only is one of the less efficient perspectives, since it actually just addresses abstinence until marriage, which diminish the importance of aspects like puberty, psychological charges, anatomy and physiology, and psychology of human relationships. The comprehensive approach has proven to be the most effective one, given that it encompasses all the possible angles of the societal issues related to sexual and reproductive health …show more content…
First, it confirms that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are not effective in changing young people’s sexual behavior or preventing negative outcomes such as teen pregnancy. More importantly, however, it confirms that programs that teach young people about both abstinence and contraception/disease prevention are, in fact, effective. In particular, the authors found that receiving information about birth control in formal sex education was associated with a 50% lower risk of teen pregnancy when compared to receiving information only on abstinence. It also confirmed that talking to young people about birth control does not lead to increased sexual activity or higher STD rates as many critics of comprehensive sexuality education continue to claim. This study is a welcome addition to the research on sexuality education and youth sexual behavior; however, there are some limitations to the data. The NSFG does not ask detailed questions about sex education. Instead, researcher categorized respondents by their answer to two basic questions. By this narrow definition they found that 66.8% of respondents reported receiving comprehensive sex education, 23.8% reported abstinence-only, and 9.4% reported no sex education. However, no information was available about the quality, context, or duration of either the abstinence-only or comprehensive sex education