Growing up, I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic high school. Just like anybody else who was raised religious, I was always taught that sex before marriage was a giant negative and something that would "ruin my soul." While I am still a practicing Catholic and respect my faith, I do have a few words to say for the sorry excuse my school gave me as sex education.

In health class, we had a guest speaker come in for an entire week to talk about abstinence. We didn't talk about STDs or get to put a condom on a banana. We didn't learn anything useful that could prevent us from bad decisions down the line. But we did learn one thing.

Having sex before marriage made us unworthy of our future husband's love.

The guest speaker took a piece of tape (meant to represent us) and we passed it around, sticking it to everyone's sweater and pulling it back off (meant to represent our sexual partners). The speaker then held up the tape and told us that having sex before marriage would make us just like this piece of tape: dirty, unworthy, imperfect and impossible to connect with our future spouse.

I remember leaving that class with such a negative view of sex and myself. Did wanting to have sex before I got married make me unworthy of my future husband? Did it make me dirty and worthless? I was so confused because something I had always viewed as a good thing was being portrayed as dirty and wrong.

Regardless of religion, every high schooler deserves to actually be taught about sex. I didn't learn that a condom is realistically only 82% effective. I had no idea that one in every two people will contract an STI by the age of 25. Nobody told me that wanting to have sex with somebody I loved and cared about was okay as long as it was MY personal choice.

Truth be told, teaching abstinence does absolutely nothing but causes people to have a negative view about sex and themselves. Religion is important, but so are your personal feelings and your right to knowledge. Shaming everyone into being a virgin isn't love. It isn't a duty. It isn't right whatsoever.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? For I am persuaded that neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any created things, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." Romans 8:35-39

In other words, nothing will ever keep God from loving us, just like not teaching us about sex won't stop anyone from making their own choices about it. All it does is send a bunch of misinformed, unknowledgeable teenagers into the world without the proper know how to handle sex. We deserve to know about it, even if we are also told not to engage in it. There has to be a happy medium somewhere. Leaving sex education out of health classes and replacing it with abstinence talks only worsens the problems we already see in the world related to sex.