Better late than never?

[pegkerr]

Found via broadsheet: In Canton, Ohio, a school board decided to expand sex education to allow for discussion on contraception after realizing that 13 percent of one high school's female students were pregnant. Yeah, ya think? That's 65 of the 490 female students becoming pregnant within a year.

Upon misia's recommendation, I just got a copy of Esther Drill's Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL for Miss Fiona. And you can bet I'll be sure to have her read it, and I'll answer any questions she might have.

Comments

[ceilidh]

What's pathetic is that it took them THAT LONG to get with it. *sigh*

[ame-chan.livejournal.com]

We use that book. IT's fabulous. Both my girls have gotten a lot of great information from it and the nice thing is, it's suitable for both the younger girl just learning about sex and her body AND for the older girl who might need other information such as birth control, STDs, social issues, eating disorders, etc.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I went to check it out. And I read the comments, most of them good. I wish there had been something like this around when I was that age!

And I am constantly amazed at the parents who think that 'if we don't tell them about it, they won't do it.'

Right. Statistics in this post totally bear that out, don't they?

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I sure wish we didn't have to choose between late and never. Can't we send this school board on a national tour to speak conservativ-ese to all the other pro-naivety school boards in the nation?

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

I simply do not understand how this is still happening in this day and age. When I was in school there was a guy who got a different girl pregnant each year he was in high school. He graduated with FOUR children by four different girls. (They were all friends, too, so you'd think they'd have known that he was useless when it came to birth control.) That was twenty-four years ago! Why is this still an issue? Well, I know why it's an issue, it's the religious conservatives who get bees in their bonnets every time someone suggests that actually explaining how to prevent pregnancy might be a good thing, because that supposedly leads to the kids having sex. :headdesk:

If you can point out to me one thing that DOESN'T lead to teenagers having sex I'd like to see it. ;) Which is why they need to know how not to get unintentionally pregnant! If the folks in charge of the schools just ASSUME that the kids ARE doing it like bunnies and make sure contraception is readily available most of the problems would be solved. (One of the problems is still that there are guys who think they're too "manly" to wear condoms, so there's a PR campaign waiting to happen that would definitely make many a church deacon faint. Ha!)

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

What got me was that it mentioned at the end of the article that 104 of the 586 babies born in the last year at two hospitals were to mothers between the ages of 11 and 19.

Yes, that said 'eleven'.

Now, I went to a city high school in a city larger than Canton, in Ohio, even (Toledo) and at the most we had . . . um . . . 13 girls out of about 200 pregnant, which is about six and a half percent. That was our ridiculous year, though.

But then again . . . we taught contraception starting in eighth grade. They taught us how to use condoms when we were 13 and it was still embarrassing/funny/something to giggle about. We also had people come into our classroom who actually had AIDS and talked to us about how it screwed everything up. So. That might have helped our percentages some.

STILL. ELEVEN. Ouch.