Abstinence Programs

Could you imagine being pregnant at the age of thirteen? Often times it has become more accepted in thing in our society that children having sex is okay. At such a young age “sex” can be very funny word but it is not, it comes with many consequences such as having a baby or contracting a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD). People were starting to become tired of the dropout rates because of teen pregnancy and STD’s spreading like fire. Therefore they invented abstinence programs. These programs were set up to decrease the number of pregnancies, dropouts, and children contracting STD’s.

Abstinence programs want kids to know that you should wait until you are married to have sex with someone you most likely won’t be with forever or how to use protection. They want you to be careful and understand the bad things that can come from just having sex one time. Another issue they would like you to be aware of is how to get protection or how to find abstinence programs around and this is called Family Planning. Family Planning is a place where a young girl can go to ask for advice or get any type of protection. Not all go to the family planning clinics as shown in the figure below the percentage of kids who pick to be abstinent, how to protect against pregnancy, of choose to go to Family Planning:

The big debate about abstinence programs is if they are full proof. Unfortunately the theory of abstinence programs is great but kids these days don’t always want to follow the rules. Many kids like to explore and see what sex is really like. Abstinence programs could delay the fact of children having sex but the numbers aren’t dropping the pregnancy and STD rates.  Often time’s kids can’t go through school without being peer pressured into doing something they don’t want to do. Peer pressure has many factors into why kids have sex. Another thing is the many different types of religions believe they sex matters to anyone. For example Mormons have many wives and the wives don’t care about one man having sex with all his wives.

It has become a huge problem that we as a society have been trying to fix. Abstinence programs are shown that they unfortunately will not do the trick. I hope for the future someone will find a solution to stop all of the unwanted pregnancy and STD’s.