This is an interesting report. I have not seen how many students in the sample were from Oklahoma. I would guess very few since most of our young people get little if any sexuality education. Perhaps the sources they counted had an impact. The following is a report from the National Partnership for Women and Families Daily Women's Health Policy Report.
September 16, 2010
Although nearly all U.S. teens receive formal sex education, only about two-thirds are given information on birth control methods, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Wednesday, the AP/Washington Post reports. The report is based on face-to-face interviews with nearly 2,800 teenagers from 2006 through 2008. For the interviews, female researchers from the University of Michigan asked the teenagers questions in their homes.
According to the report, about 97% of teens said they received formal sex education by age 18. The report defined formal sex education as instruction at a school, church, community center or other setting that dealt with sexually transmitted infections, birth control or saying no to sex.Instruction on STIs and how to say no to sex was more common than discussion about how to use a condom or other birth control methods, according to the study.
The report found that about two-thirds of teens -- 62% of boys and 70% of girls -- received instruction on birth control by the end of high school, while about 92% reported instruction on STIs and HIV prevention. About 81% of boys and 87% of girls were taught about how to say no to sex.
The findings of the report are similar to those in a 2002 CDC study that found about 85% of high schools and 72% of middle schools teach human sexuality and sex education, according to the AP/Post. The new report did not address trends in sex education, which shifted in the past two years from abstinence-only curricula to comprehensive sex education programs that discuss birth control.
John Santelli, a Columbia University professor of population and family health, noted that government policies stressing abstinence-only sex education were still in place when the report was conducted (Stobbe, AP/Washington Post, 9/15).
Joyce Abma, a demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of the report, said that the goal of the report is to update information on sex education, including how many students are receiving it, what information they are getting, and which sources the information is coming from (Wetzstein, Washington Times, 9/15).
