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A Sexually Educated Youth: My Utopian Vision for the Future of America

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A Sexually Educated Youth: My Utopian Vision for the Future of America
Jacqueline Rivera
Professor Cerny
ENST 209-03
11 April 2012
A Sexually Educated Youth: My Utopian Vision for the Future of America
Deciding a utopian vision that I would be familiar with in order to change the process had proved to be quite difficult. Feeling defeated on this paper, I sat down and watched my usual television programming and started to watch a favorite show of mine, ‘16 & Pregnant ‘. I watch ‘16 & Pregnant’ and episode after episode and observe a teenagers trying to raise a child and deal with the consequences of having a child at that age. After empathizing with the latest teenager to appear in the show’s fourth season of airing I realized what I am watching weekly in a sixty to ninety minute part of my day doesn’t need to happen. If teenagers were educated thoroughly throughout their lives on human sexuality and behavior, I believe the rate of teen pregnancy would rapidly decline. A decline in teenagers becoming pregnant would be my utopian vision for the future.
In order for a person to start to reform a process, one must analyze the data and declare what is wrong with the current system in order for it to be improved upon or altered. According to StayTeen.org, “… 3 in 10 teen girls in the US will get pregnant at least once before age 20? That 's about 745,000 teen pregnancies each year. Yikes.” (Unknown 1) and DoSomething.org states “There is currently no federal law program dedicated to supporting comprehensive sexuality education that teaches young people about both abstinence and contraception” (Unknown1). Though the rate for teen pregnancy is at a record low, there is no sexual education program that is nationally based and federally provided which means the issue starts on a federal level for education and slowly goes in to the state level. The state level sexual education programs are what I like call side effects.
I call the state level programs of sexual education side effects because the programs state wide in the United


Cited: "11 Facts about Sex Education in the U.S." DoSomething.org. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-sex-education-us> "Know the Facts." Teen Pregnancy. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://stayteen.rg/teen-pregnancy> "State Policies on Sex Education in Schools." NCSL Home. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/state-policies-on-sex-education-in-schools.aspx> "Teen Pregnancy Prevention." NCSL Home. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/teen-pregnancy-prevention.aspx>
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