In the span of three days, a pair of 14-year-old girls from Houston each attempted to abandon infants they said they didn’t know they were carrying. Both cases raise the question of whether sex education in Houston schools is failing students.
On Thursday, an 8th grader at Cedar Bayou Junior School in Baytown excused herself from class to go to the bathroom where she delivered a baby boy, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The teenage mother then tried to flush her baby down the toilet, but another student, who had been in the bathroom while the mother was in labor, ran to tell the school nurse, police said.
The nearly full-term infant died in the bathroom and an autopsy later confirmed that the baby boy was alive when the mother attempted to flush him down the toilet, police said.
The girl told police she didn’t know she was pregnant, and people who knew her said they never noticed, because she usually wore baggy clothes.
Another 14-year-old gave birth to a stillborn baby on an airplane and then discarded the body in the waste bin, the Chronicle reported Monday.
The eighth grader was returning to Houston from a school trip to New York with a group of middle school students. She also told police she didn’t know she was pregnant.
These two tragic cases occurred because both teenage girls were not aware of any options available to them. A mother at Cedar Bayou Junior School told the Chronicle that the school district teaches abstinence-based sex education classes, but cases like these do nothing to reinforce their effectiveness.
A study also showed that one-fourth of female teenagers in America has a sexually transmitted disease. The director of the UH Health Center, Floyd Robinson, told The Daily Cougar ("STD findings no shock to officials ", News, Thursday) that students practicing abstinence is not necessarily the reality.
"People have to take the blinders off," Robinson said. "Abstinence is not being practiced. People foolishly think that it is."
It’s time our school districts recognize that teenagers are having sex and will continue to have sex, whether or not they are informed of all the consequences. Limiting sex education to abstinence-only methods will continue to result in such unfortunate stories.
