This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If Utah teenagers said they believe the Nile River is in southern Utah and that the American Civil War was fought in Europe, parents, legislators and educators would be horrified at the failure of education in the Beehive State.
But a new national survey shows our teens are just as miserably misinformed about sex and pregnancy, and it's highly unlikely that policy makers will bat an eye over that deficiency. In fact, Utah law prohibits teachers from arming teenagers with the comprehensive sex education they need, even when they are woefully clueless about this important topic.
That's shameful, since lacking knowledge about their own bodies is potentially much more harmful to Utah's young people than ignorance about geography or history. Rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases attest to that.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included Utah teenage mothers whose pregnancies had been unintended in its Pregnant Risk Assessment Monitoring System survey from 2004 to 2008. Utah Department of Health workers asked 17,000 new mothers, all between 15 and 19 years old, about their experiences and attitudes about sex and pregnancy before, during and after pregnancy.
Their answers reveal an astonishing ignorance. Forty-nine percent said they "thought I couldn't get pregnant at the time," while 23.8 percent said they thought either they or their partner was sterile. Other reasons they had sex without contraception were that their partner didn't want to use birth control or the girl did not mind if she got pregnant.
A higher percentage of Utah girls offered each of those reasons than did girls in the other 18 states in the survey.
Another sad but not surprising statistic: More than 22 percent of the Utah teen mothers "had trouble getting birth control," compared to 14 percent of the other girls surveyed.
There were no follow-up questions to determine why these teenagers believed they couldn't get pregnant or were sterile. We can only speculate that they might have naively believed stories they had heard or fell victim to a partner's promise. But, regardless of the specific circumstance, if they had been armed with correct information taught to them by professional educators in public school, they would have been more likely to make a better choice. And if they had access to information about contraception and contraceptives, they would have been both forewarned and forearmed.
As it is, Utah public schools, hindered by Republican legislators who equate knowledge with permission to be promiscuous, cannot protect teenage girls from unintended pregnancy.