There is a growing need to educate our teenaged children about sexual intercourse through proper sex education. This is because of two main reasons: one, to prevent the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and others; and two, to prevent teenage pregnancies.

Apart from teenage pregnancies being a health hazard for the teens, often teenagers are unprepared to handle pregnancy and childbirth. Hence it’s important to teach teenagers the serious consequences of irresponsible sexual activities. Also facts like a pregnant teenager may cause serious damage to her own health and that of her fetus in trying to hide the pregnancy, ignorance amongst teens about proper prenatal care that is required, ignorance about heath dangers in pregnancy like smoking, alcohol consumption and drug abuse, all together may put a great deal of stress to the fetus that will be born as well as its teenaged mother.

A teen pregnancy may also lead to the teenaged girl to postpone her education, and she may not be able to have enough skills and training to support herself and the child afterwards. If the teen father takes the responsibility of the mother and the child, then by all means he will have to give up being educated further for the sake if a job. Also for the teenage parents, they lack adequate parenting skills that come with years of education and experience of life, and more often children born to such parents become the victims of child abuse.

When we look at all these facts together with the severe social stigma been attached to unwed teen pregnancies in India and else where, it is not difficult to understand why sex education programs for teenagers are so much required.

In the year 2002 the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had asked the schools to incorporate the subject of sex education in schools across the country, but in reality there are more schools that are hesitant about educating their students about sex than the schools, which had gone ahead with the inclusion of the topic. Sex education as a subject is yet to be accepted as a normal part of the school curriculum, and the problem is not only in India alone.

The main debate for the subject had centers around the question about the benefits of teaching children about contraception. And yet research had shown that comprehensive sex education programs, which teach the children about the benefits of both abstinence and contraception, had been quite effective in making the young adults take better decisions about sex that had affected their health the least.

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SOURCE: British Journal of Urology International