The United States has unacceptably high rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and HIV/AIDS infections. To address this challenge, NARAL Pro-Choice America supports honest, age-appropriate, and medically accurate sex education that promotes abstinence and provides young people with the information they need to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, anti-choice lawmakers and groups have a strategy that would only make our teen-pregnancy epidemic worse: spending your hard-earned tax dollars on unproven, ideological "abstinence-only" programs that actually censor life-saving information.
Research shows that honest, medically accurate sex education works. "Abstinence-only" programs aren’t proven effective, and some studies even show that young people who go through these programs are less likely to use contraception and protect themselves when they become sexually active. Making matters worse, many of these "abstinence-only" programs include blatantly false and inaccurate information. Young people deserve better than this – and so do taxpayers.
There is also overwhelming public support for honest sex education: 99 percent of Americans believe it is appropriate for young people to have information about STDs, and 94 percent of Americans think it is appropriate to teach young people about birth control.
Sex education is a broad term used to describe education about human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, and other aspects of human sexual behavior. Common avenues for sex education are parents or caregivers, school programs, and public health campaigns.
