In many high schools across the country, students are still being told never to have premarital sex, as if we are still in the 1940’s or some other time period, when any mention of what goes on between the sheets was completely taboo. Although the idea that we can instill middle and high schoolers with a desire to refrain from sexual activity is in many ways valiant, it does more harm than good by taking an all-or-nothing approach to sex.

Whereas the costs of protected teen sex are based more on one’s individual and personal morals, the costs of unprotected sex are clear and obvious. Preaching to high school students about the costs of sexual activity is not going to register in those who do not already feel that such behavior is wrong. Showing the real consequences of sex, such as unplanned pregnancies and disease, in correlation with information on how to reduce these risks is, however, much more relevant to teenage attitudes.

Yes, no protection method is 100 percent effective, aside from abstinence, but abstinence is a lot harder than using a condom, and a lot less appealing. Yes, it’s still possible to get pregnant and to transmit diseases when having sex responsibly, but the chances are much, much lower. The greatest obstacle preventing effective sex education is the idea that it would be wrong to do so. I’m sorry, but regardless of people’s ideologies, nobody believes that an unwanted child is upholding anyone’s virtue.

As far as teenage sex is concerned, people fall into one of two categories: those who are going to do it, and those who will not. Perhaps there is a very small number of people out there who will be persuaded by abstinence education to refrain from sex, but telling students to abstain from sex isn’t going to prevent people from doing so. Rather, it wastes the opportunity to let them learn to do so responsibly.

Is it really worth it to stop one or two people from having sex at all when you could convince dozens to have sex safely? Perhaps according to some peoples’ worldviews the current approach is worthwhile, but these people are ignoring the effects of unprotected and uninformed sex in our society.

Many people running our educational system are more preoccupied with ideologies and appearances of things than they are with fact and practicality. While it may, to some, seem wrong to educate teens in such a way that implies that sex is acceptable, it is far worse to leave them clueless as to how to have sex responsibly.

I was lucky enough to attend a school where sex education was taught with the idea that we already knew what sex was. When I was in eighth grade, our sex education teacher passed condoms, diaphragms, IUDs and other assorted contraceptive devices around our class, exposing my class to what some of us had only heard referred to in hushed tones.

Although in our society things like condoms and the pill are often only referred to in guarded whispers, sexuality is plastered across billboards and magazine covers. Exposure to sex is something that Americans get as soon as they are able to recognize it. Why is information on how to minimize the risks associated with sexual activity less readily available?

It’s as if society is giving us only two messages. The media is telling us we must have sex while many schools are still telling students it’s wrong. Although in many cases the two influences might have a reasonable shot at canceling each other out, in truth biology is on the side of the media. By the time people graduate from high school, they’ve almost definitely experienced a deep-seated desire for sex at some point.

Yes, there are people in the world who for many different reasons aren’t going to go along with that desire. They may wish to wait for marriage, or be too busy. They may not know anyone specific they want to have sex with, or be uncomfortable with their bodies, or feel that they’re emotionally unready. These people are not going to have sex, whether you teach them the importance of abstinence or if you give them a condom, a banana and explicit instructions.

But there are also a lot of people who decide that between the images they’re exposed to on a daily basis and the hormones raging through their bodies, they’re going to have sex. No amount of preaching on the importance of saving oneself until marriage and adulthood is going to prevent them from doing what they want to do. Anyone who thinks it’s effective for adults to tell teenagers what they should and shouldn’t do has to do nothing more than look at decades of empirical evidence to learn that this isn’t the case.

Just because someone does not object to premarital sex does not mean that they are irrational. There is an idea of calculated risk involved. As it is now, however, teenagers are being presented with the choice between sex and no sex. They are not being given the power to have sex in more responsible ways. Abstinence education does little to prevent teenage sex, and wasting the opportunity to prevent many of its consequences.