S

from the willingness to stay and really learn about the communities. Learn their curriculum, learn their craft.

Sex ed in the US is kind of a joke. Take, for example, this clip from Tina Fey's mean. Girls don't have sex because you will get pregnant and

die. With the majority of U.S. students reporting they've had sex before graduating high school, the type of sex ed they receive is a big

deal for themselves, personally and for the economy. Direct medical costs of unintended pregnancy in the United States totaled at least $5.5

billion in 2018, a rise from the 2011 estimate of $4.6 billion.

But there's been a debate spanning decades about what information to include in the curriculum. We believe that sex education is an economic

justice issue for the ability of giving people the determination over their own decision making as it

relates to families and sexual activity and behavior. As a society becomes more diverse, it's ever more

difficult to have any sort of consensus on a subject like sex and sexuality because it's so deeply

connected to our ideas about ourselves as human beings. So the politics of this are complicated.

Most young people are getting something. They're just not getting very much sex education.

There is no national or federal mandate around sex education. And so what kids are taught in schools varies

by state, by county, even by school. Only in sex ed is the sex ed teacher enjoined to actually

change how the kids behave out of school. And this may be an impossible burden.

So what does sex education mean for the economy and what happens when some students are left behind?

Sex education didn't become a part of the public school system until the early 20th century. Why do babies have fathers?

There was a panic in American cities about sexually transmitted diseases. Middle and upper middle class white men were patronizing prostitutes,

which has always been a conduit for STDs. Infected prostitutes are being legally removed for

cure and rehabilitation. And we're going home and infecting their wives. There was a rise in reported cases of venereal disease

among young people. During the First World War, as more and more soldiers got infected with STDs that the federal government

started to sponsor efforts at sex ed. Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections is one common goal of sex ed.

Another is preventing unintended pregnancies, especially among teenagers. There are two general approaches to adolescent sex

education. One is abstinence only until marriage, which is also called sexual risk avoidance. This curriculum teaches that abstaining from

sex is the expected behavior for teenagers and frequently excludes information about contraception options and other safe sex practices.

My name is Maryanne Mosaddeq and I'm the president and CEO of a national nonprofit called Ascend.

And we support the sexual risk avoidance education. When you say the word abstinence only, it seems

that it would be inferring that abstinence is the only thing we talk about in a sexual risk avoidance

program. It's way more than that. It's very holistic and talks about lots of broader

topics that impact a person's life. The second curriculum is called Comprehensive Sex

Education, which provides students with information about abstinence as well as safer sex practices such as

contraception use and ways to reduce risk for contracting an STI. These programs may also include discussions of

miscarriages, abortions, sexual orientation and gender identity. Those are the extremes.

Most programs fall someplace in the middle. The middle ground curriculum is usually called abstinence

plus. These programs typically stress abstinence as the best way to prevent pregnancy and STI

transmission, while also including information about contraception and condom use. I think we all agree that very young adolescents ought

not to be engaging in behaviors that could get them pregnant or cause them to have an STD.

I think that really the divide is on. How do you get there? Do you get there by withholding critical

information or do you get there by providing the information and developing the skills that young people

are going to need to stay out of risky situations? The government doesn't set any requirements for sexual

health education policy unless a program is receiving federal funding. That means each state sets its own policies, which

leads to inconsistent curricula across the country. I did a study that showed that even among Republicans,

there was support for teaching practically every topic in sex education when we've had controversy in

this country over sex education. The truth is, it has really been caused by a very small

vocal minority. And I think that's created the perception that there is more debate and dissent about sex education than

there actually is in communities across the country. Despite this narrowing of public opinion, sex

education policy is still inconsistent across the US, with some states not requiring schools to teach

any sex education at all. 32 states and Washington, D.C. require students to receive some kind of sex education,

according to the sex ed advocacy group six. 33 states require the curricula to emphasize

abstinence whenever sex or HIV education is taught, and 16 states require instruction on

contraception. Only 19 states require that lesson plans be medically accurate.

What we discovered was that most kids can get access to that basic information about condoms and so forth

from a variety of sources. I mean, you see it on TV. Mtv shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom

potentially contributed to lower teen birth rates, according to a 2014 study from the National Bureau of

Economic Research. Because I'm pregnant. The researchers concluded that these shows led to a

5.7% reduction in teen births between 2009 and 2010. Sex education has some

big public health goals, and if they aren't achieved, they can have serious economic consequences.

Teenagers who unintentionally become pregnant tend to receive less education and are less likely to have a spouse with whom they can share in

the financial support of raising a child. Society as a whole loses big time because we lose the productivity. Babies born to teens are much more

susceptible to being low birth weight and having other health conditions that bear down on the health

care system. Raise our health care costs. A lot of those costs get funded through public dollars when it comes to teen pregnancy.

It is a little bit challenging to figure out economic impacts because all too often the young

people who experience teen pregnancy are already very low income. So the fact that they remain low income

may be more the result of the fact that it's really hard to change economic quintiles in this country

versus really being associated with being an early parent. The high cost of teen pregnancy may have pushed

Mississippi into legislating sex education requirements in 2000. Nine teen births in Mississippi cost taxpayers

nearly $155 million, according to a report from the Mississippi Economic Policy Center.

The report attributes these costs to lower wages among teen parents, higher incarceration rates for the

children of teen parents, and increased foster care costs. In 2011, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour

signed a law that required all school districts to adopt a sex education curriculum. Family planning allows parents to control the

timing of when they have children, how many children they have, which allows them to be able to

prioritize how to pursue their education and career. There have been a number of studies on birth control

itself, which shows that any $1 investment in family planning ends up saving 4 to $7 in terms of preventing

unintended pregnancy on the other end. That certainly saves money in terms of the economy.

Absolutely. Sexual delay is so important. Three out of five children who are living in poverty

live in families that are headed by unwed mothers. And we know the impact of single parents in terms of

the benefits, the entitlement programs that we have in place for them, and that that all impacts the

economy. Access to birth control options such as the pill is correlated with higher earnings potential for

women. Many women with access to the pill have lower wages in their twenties as they pursue more education. But then their income grows more rapidly in

their thirties and forties, compared to women who did not have access to the pill. Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections also has economic

impact. The CDC estimates that in 2018, about one in five people in the U.S. had an STI with half of new STI cases among people aged

15 to 24. The CDC estimates STIs cost the US nearly $16 billion in

health care costs alone. Care for 15 to 24 year olds made up an estimated 26% of

that total cost. Testing and treating for sexually transmitted infections does incur a huge cost through both

public insurance, private insurance, individual costs, and, of course, the life long costs of some of the

viral STDs. For a particular individual who may be having to go to the doctor more by more treatments throughout their

life. It can be a really high cost. There is no federal policy in the United States that

governs sex education. Rather, the way that the federal government is

involved in sex education is by appropriating limited funding for certain kinds of approaches.

The US government began funding abstinence only programs in the 1980s during the Reagan administration as fear of HIV and AIDS spread

throughout the country. Frequently, these programs were faith based. The amount of money the federal government puts into

sex education really expanded as part of welfare reform in 1996.

And since then there has been some funding, a couple hundred million dollars that has really gone back

and forth. The funding for abstinence only education has varied with the electoral cycle. So during the Obama era it went down.

During the Trump era, it went back up. In 2015, the federal government provided about $55 million.

In 2021, that number was up to 110 million. The Obama administration was the first to try to

establish some evidence based metrics to federal funding. They also created the Teen Pregnancy

Prevention Program in order to strengthen federal funding for more medically accurate evidence based

programs. But they did not discontinue the sexual risk avoidance programs.

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which was established in 2010, is a national evidence based

grant program to develop and evaluate new approaches to prevent unintended pregnancies and STIs among

adolescents. The program has been funded to the tune of about $100 million each year through fiscal year

2021. In July 2021, the House passed a bill that would allocate $130 million to the program that would

last through September 2022. As of December 2021, that bill has not passed the Senate. The federal government also provides

funds through the Competitive Personal Responsibility Education Program. This funding stream supports a variety of

evidence based programs that focus on young people ages 10 to 19 who are homeless in or aging out of

foster care, living with HIV or AIDS, victims of human trafficking, or living in areas with high

adolescent birth rates. The program's goals are to prevent pregnancy and STIs. By emphasizing abstinence and contraception, it

typically receives roughly 70 to $75 Million in funding per year. Both abstinence only and comprehensive sex

ed. Proponents claim victory in that the teen birthrate in the U.S. has fallen to a new low every

year since 2009. The American approach is always emphasize the activity. After all, that's what a rate is, right?

An STD rate or a pregnancy rate. That's a collective measure, a collective

outcome. And the European approach has been much more focused on the individual, helping each individual develop what the sex ed is call a healthy sexual life.

Now, that's really difficult in a diverse society because healthy is an extremely loaded and

evaluated term. And what's healthy to one set of individuals or communities may not be healthy to another.

I hope to see in the world is really universal, comprehensive sex education being offered.

We are working with the federal government and members of Congress to advance new legislation, the

Real Education and Access for Healthy Youth Act that speaks directly to those needs. I also believe that it means that we are doing the

right thing by talking about sex education from this bigger goal perspective than just

preventing teenage pregnancy. It's really important that we reinforce those good

habits that the teens are making right now by helping them with refusal skills, self-regulation skills,

helping them with goal setting. Putting an eye on their future personal agency is extremely important, and we're only there to provide

the medical facts and to also begin to instill some critical thinking.