Blog 4 part 2

The speaker from Planned Parenthood gave an extensive lecture on sex education and the prevention of disease and pregnancy. Her talk intersected with many of the same topics looked at in the documentary “The Education of Shelby Knox.” In this documentary, Shelby is a teen girl from Lubbock, Texas who has been exposed only to “abstinence-only” sex education. When she looks around at her school and sees how high the pregnancy rate is, she realized that there must be something lacking in the abstinence-only approach to teaching adolescents about sex and sexual behavior. She begins to become active in the community and to push for comprehensive sex education in schools. Our speaker from Planned Parenthood covered many of the issues that Shelby pushed for in the Lubbock School system. During these abstinence only sex ed classes, students were taught that the only way to practice safe sex is to abstain from sexual behavior until marriage. Although Knox was committed to her own personal vow to abstain, she believed that this educational program was not acknowledging the realities of life for some teens. She knew that some teens were having sex, and believed that someone needed to offer comprehensive sex education to not only teach teens about the dangers of sexual behavior, but also to teach them ways other than abstinence to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. Our Planned Parenthood speaker touched on many of the same issues that Shelby was interested in. She talked about the various types of sex, and the risks involved in all of them. It is important for teens to realize that sexual behaviors other than vaginal intercourse do exist. In some cases, these behaviors may be safer than intercourse, but there are still dangers associated with them all. These behaviors include oral sex, anal sex and “outer-course.” It is also important, our speaker told us, to behave in a sexually responsible manner. This means treating your partner with love, trust and respect. It also means talking to your partner about their feelings about particular behaviors, and acknowledging ways in which you can make sexual behaviors safer. From there, she went into the mechanics of safe sex-for example, she introduced a variety of birth control options, from pills to patches to forms of surgery that can prevent pregnancy. She also showed both male and female condoms, which in addition to helping prevent pregnancy also stop the spread of disease. She talked about proper condom use and addressed how to stop rips or breaks in condoms that undermine their purpose and put the user and their partner at risk for pregnancy and STDs. She also told us easy and cheap ways that we can access the various forms of birth control. This type of comprehensive sex education is exactly what Shelby Knox fights for in “The Education of Shelby Knox.” She argues that students in her school district will be better prepared to protect themselves and their partner if they have adequate knowledge of prevention. In this way, our Planned Parenthood lecture intersected with much of the content in “The Education of Shelby Knox.”