SEXEDISNOTREPRODUCTIVEHEALTH

Rosemonetlittle

A 12 year-old girl is starting her first year of middle school. She is faced with a new environment, new culture, new friends, new teachers, and above all, a new onset of hormonal and bodily changes. She looks physically different from every other student attending the school. She tries to fit in with all the other girls; however, underneath her false presentation she knows she is completely different and, most of all, that she is changing. Her body is transforming and maturing, and she lacks the guidance from her peers, parents, and educational system to understand how to process these changes.

This girl was me. I was the mixed African American-Mexican girl attending school who not only looked completely different from my peers but also was the first to experience a menstrual cycle. In school, I was taught about the solar system, how to write a paper, and complex math, but I was never taught about reproductive health. I was seventeen years old, five years after my first menstrual cycle, when I enrolled in a sex education course in high school.

The school’s curriculum for sex education focused mainly on abstinence, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), common contraceptives, and fetal development. The curriculum excluded reproductive health information on emotional and physical adjustments during puberty, vaginal and penile health, variations of vaginal discharge, LGBTQ+ sex education, intrinsic health factors during pregnancy, and most importantly, information on where to access resources like local reproductive health clinics. Such topics and resources are crucial to reproductive health, yet they are routinely excluded from current sex education curricula in the United States. This criteria is from the implementation of the 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which actively funds sex educational programs for adolescents that emphasizes a limited overview of sex education, abstinence promotion, and the dismissal of overall quality to reproductive health education. Urgent reform must be administered for AFLA to encompass an inclusive,