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Who Is Responsible for Sex Education?

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Submitted By jmarco
Words 1354
Pages 6
Who is Responsible for Sex Education?
Writing 291
Joseph A. Marco
22 July 2010

Public schools systems have been implementing sexual education into their classrooms as a regular part of instruction for decades. Ongoing controversies exist when dealing with this issue whether sex education being taught in the public schools or whether it should be considered the responsibility of the parents. It seems most parents are either for or against it and very rarely are they standing on middle ground. Given the statistics does it matter who teaches the children of the United States the basics of sex education? Children should receive a basic unbiased and informative sex education in school, from their it should be the parents responsibility. By their 18th birthday, six in 10 teenage women and more than 5 in 10 teenage men have had sexual intercourse. Of the approximately 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur each year, 82 percent are unintended with more than one quarter ending abortion. The United States continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world – almost twice as high as England, Canada, and Wales and eight times as high as the Netherlands and Japan. In addition to the teen pregnancy rate, the teens in the United States contract roughly nine million new sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) each year. Though teens in the United States have levels of sexual activity similar to levels among their Canadian, English, French, and Swedish peers, they are likely to have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships and are less likely to use contraceptives. Between the reluctant communication by parents and the restricted school education who is teaching our children and giving them the tools to make smart and rational decisions? Parents are often reluctant to have this discussion with their kids for many reasons. The

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