Sex education in America is a disaster. As of May 2025, only 26 states require that sex and HIV education be medically accurate (insanity!), while 14 states mandate abstinence-only education. Unsurprisingly, five of those 14 states have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy: Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The other seven states with abstinence-only “education” school programs are Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri. Even though studies have shown over and over that abstinence-only education programs do not succeed in reducing rates of teen pregnancies or STDs, this is, horrifyingly, where we are today.

In Florida, where anti-sex education legislation took effect nearly three years ago, STI rates among minors are at a 15-year high. Recently, an anti-abortion Republican senator introduced a bill to restrict access to treatment and birth control for Florida teens by requiring them to secure parental consent, while completely ignoring the fact that many of those kids are at risk from the very people they’d be required to confide in to receive care.

The push by conservative politicians around the country to curb access to sex education and birth control for teens under the guise of “protecting” them chills me to the bone, because I’ve seen firsthand how it plays out. 

I grew up in Newfoundland, Canada, where the school system was run by religious denominations like the Roman Catholic Church (the name of my high school, Holy Heart of Mary, says it all). Like most of my peers, I was taught by nuns (boys were taught by priests), and, while they were great with subjects like literature and politics, they adhered to church doctrine when it came to sex ed: Don’t have sex, they told us. Subject closed. There was never any talk of birth control. It was a sin. Even if you didn’t think sex was a sin, and you wanted to buy a pack of condoms, it meant facing the local pharmacist, who definitely knew your mom. No thanks. 

I was a teen at the height of the AIDS crisis in the early ‘90s, when there was scant information about the terrifying epidemic that was killing millions of people around the world. Ronald Regan famously refused to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic for years; by the time he first said the word “AIDS” in public in 1987, 21,000 Americans had already died from the disease. In Newfoundland, misinformation about HIV/AIDS was rampant. We were told it was only transmitted between men having sex, and/or intravenous drug users; the idea of a straight cis teen contracting HIV seemed impossible.

When reports emerged from an area of rural Newfoundland that dozens of young women were testing positive for HIV, my friends and I didn’t know what to think. The area had one of Canada’s highest HIV infection rates for teenage girls. There weren’t intravenous drug users — so what was going on? Unfortunately, the answer was unprotected sex, with zero testing or contact tracing in the community. Girls my age were getting sick, and dying, from a disease we’d been led to believe wouldn’t affect us. 

I took a summer job in 1991 with the Newfoundland and Labrador AIDS Commission as one of three young folks hired to create a short educational play about teen sex. We wrote a piece that included frank discussions about condom use, consent, partner notification, and other things that felt radical at the time. Then we hit the road to tour to outport towns, where we performed in Elks’ Lodges and school auditoriums for young audiences. 

One of our first shows was in Bay Roberts, a town in the area where the infection rate was highest. The response was, predictably, a lot of giggling and elbow nudges from the kids in the audience, especially when we performed our end-of-show demo on how to put on a condom using a banana. But then, they hushed when we brought a guest to the stage.

She was 16 or 17, and she looked like any other ‘90s girl, with her frosted blonde hair, acid-washed jeans, and Bon Jovi T-shirt. But her clothing hung loose, and her teeth were prominent in her frighteningly gaunt face. She was in the late stage of AIDS; at that point, she weighed less than 80 pounds. She told us how she’d contracted HIV through unprotected sex with a boy who didn’t know he was passing it on; he’d contracted it from another teen girl, who was unaware of her own status.

She did what no school authority or medical professional had done for those kids: she told the truth about sex, HIV, and AIDS. She wanted us to understand what can happen when you don’t have the information you need. The audience was quiet. She asked if anyone had questions. Some did, and she answered them patiently. No, she’d never used a needle to do drugs. No, she’d never had a blood transfusion. No, there was no treatment for AIDS (this was the early 1990s). Yes, she was going to die. Afterwards, she stayed to talk to anyone who wanted to come up to her. Her courage that day was immense.

I never saw that young woman again, but I have not forgotten her, or the outrage I felt, and still feel, about kids being prevented from using contraception because of religious doctrine. Stopping sex education programs and preventing access to contraception is not about protecting young people. A lack of sex education will never do anything but increase the risk of endangering their health. Abstinence-only education does not work. It’s our responsibility to make sure teens have all the information they need to make safer choices, along with access to contraception and STI testing. It’s the only ethical thing to do.