More High School Students Abstaining From Sex, CDC Finds
Statistics from the Centers for Disease control have found that nearly 60 percent of high school students have never had sexual intercourse despite the push in America's school systems to teach students the about safe sex and contraception.
According the CDC's 2015 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, about 41.2 percent of high school students in America admit to ever having sexual intercourse, which marks a 5.6 percentage point decrease in the amount of high school students that the center found had ever had sexual intercourse in its 2013 survey.
Considering that 41.2 percent of high school students report ever having sex, that means that 58.8 percent of high school students have abstained from having sex. The survey also finds that only 30.1 percent of high school students are sexually active, meaning they had sex in the last three months.
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These findings come as federal government grants for sex education have given a distinct advantage to safe-sex and Comprehensive Sex Education approaches (CSE).
In fiscal year 2016, only $10 million in federal grants will be given to Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) programs, as opposed to the $100 million in federal funding provided to the Obama administration's Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.
"The good news from the CDC report makes it abundantly clear that the Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) message is resonating with teens as they increasingly wait for sex," Valerie Huber, CEO of the SRA advocacy organization Ascend, told The Christian Post on Friday. "The percent of teens who have chosen to wait has increased 28 percent in the past two decades, an astounding fact, especially given the cultural expectation for teens to have sex. But this is news that requires action."
Despite the Obama administration's push for CSE and the safe-sex approach to sex education, the CDC report finds that there is very little change from 2007 until now in the amount of high school students who did not use any contraception method to prevent pregnancy during their last sexual intercourse.
In fact, the CDC finds that there is a 1.9 percentage-point increase since 2009 in the number of sexually active high school students who did not use any contraception method to prevent pregnancy during their last sexual intercourse.
Additionally, CDC finds that there has been a 4.6 percentage-point decrease since 2009 in the number of sexually active high school students who used condoms during their last sexual intercourse.
"Policy makers must place an emphasis on SRA education, rather than an approach that normalizes teen sex," Huber told CP. "Parents should be encouraged to set the high expectation that their children reserve sex for marriage. School sex education classes should reinforce the healthy behaviors being made by more and more teens. And churches, local agencies, and every other entity that has an influence over America's youth should rethink the message they are sending to teens about sex. Are these messages normalizing teen sex or normalizing waiting?"
"If youth can make increasingly healthy decisions about sex without the reinforcement and support of adults and mentoring organizations, think of what it might look like if those influencers stepped up to the plate and promoted the healthiest choices for teens and their sexual health?" Huber continued.
The conservative organization American College of Pediatricians discussed the CDC numbers in a report published Wednesday that asserts that "Comprehensive Sex Education is failing."
"Teens who do choose to engage in sexual activity are using less birth control; sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are on the rise, as is adolescent depression, sometimes referred to as the emotional STI," the report states. "Sexual abstinence is the only behavior choice that offers adolescents 100 percent protection against the triple epidemic of depression, STIs and teen pregnancy due to early sexual debut."
As many of America's school districts and universities have been giving out free condoms to their students in hopes of preventing sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies, a report published in June by University of Notre Dame researchers Kasey Buckle and Daniel Hungerman suggests that access to condoms in schools has led to a 10 percent increase in teen births and a notable increase in Gonorrhea among women.
