sex education

Have you ever volunteered abroad (or in your own country) and wondered what would happen once you left? Would your message become lost with time? Would the people whose lives you saw change go back to how they once were?

A young woman dying of AIDS lay in the bed before me. Staring at her frail, disease-stricken body, the words of a family friend echoed in my head, "Why is Kellie going to Africa? Does she really think that one person can make a difference?"

As I sit in my mother’s living room, I watch as my sixteen year old little sister and her five very loud mouthed friends clown around. I watch as they whisper and joke and dance with one another. I watch as they pick up one of their many cell phones and began to dial one of the boys they call themselves liking this week.

I was going to discuss STIs/STDs for the second posting of this, but pregnancy seems to be more of a concern. I will stand by one of my former statements- if you can't openly talk about sex to a potential partner, then you are either not ready to have sex or are not with the right person. It's important to be able to talk about the risks in sexual activity, including the chance of pregnancy.

I consider myself well educated on the topic of sex education. From reading blog after blog of confusion and misunderstandings about the topic, I want to help educate other people. It's obviously not happening in schools or homes, so I might as well do it here.

The CDC recently conducted a study and found that 1 in 4 teenage girls are infected with some type of STD. That is equal to 3.2 million teenage girls nation wide. Also, in some places, 1 in 3 girls will become pregnant by the age of 20. That is an outrageous number when we have so many resources that we do not use properly.

I am sorry to say that abstinence-only sexual education was taught in my middle school when I was a child.

This post started out as a response to a post about teen sex.