I moved into my college dorm this week, and with that came the standard warning of “don’t get pregnant.” Since I go to a Christian college, the suggestion for the best way to avoid this is to not have sex. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? Then my resident hall director told us how this is an issue every year, so I did some research on the issue.

Obviously teen pregnancy is not an issue for everyone on a college campus, because once someone hits 20, they no longer are a teen. But since a lot of data has been collected about teen pregnancies, let’s widen our scope to include both high school and college.

In 2014, which was the most recent data I could find, there were 249,078 babies born to girls aged 15-19. Apparently about 11% of these pregnancies were to married females. While I question why these girls are married so young, I’m not sure anyone has a problem with married young ladies being pregnant. That leaves us with about 221,679 pregnancies occurring out of wedlock. It is notable that the percentage of teen births has decreased since it’s peak in the mid-50s. However, over 200,000 pregnancies are nothing to bat an eye at.

There have been two main methods used in school systems to prevent their students from getting pregnant. One is to promote the idea of abstinence before marriage, the other is to promote and educate about the idea of “safe sex.” (In the course of researching I discovered that promoting a certain diet was once used as a possible solution, amongst some other ideas that have been discontinued.)

Obviously, the encouragement to refrain from sex until marriage stems from the church. The Christian church has long promoted saving sex for marriage, and various religions have adopted this idea as well. It used to be that sex education was reserved for the family to take care of, not the school system, and the plurality of families taught abstinence was the best way to go.

For a while, this was the main ideology. However, in the 1980s, it started losing ground. By the end of the decade, 23 states required sex education and 23 more states strongly encouraged it. The debate now is what exactly should sex education teach?

Those who support only abstinence do so because they believe that teaching youth about safe sex practices will increase sexual activity in youth. Whereas those who adhere to the other ideology think that youth are going to be doing sexual things outside of marriage anyway, so the schools might as well tell them how to not get pregnant or diseased.

The main difference in these ideologies are what they are trying to prevent. Abstinence only is trying to prevent sex outside of marriage altogether. Sex education is trying to prevent STDs and pregnancies.

To the latter’s credit, teen pregnancy has reduced over the years and seems to be on the decline. (Keeping in mind that I don’t have data for the last two years.) I can’t find much data on the former’s claim, however. As of 2015, 41% of surveyed high school students say they’ve had sexual intercourse. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find surveys from previous years to compare how this percentage has changed over time. In any case, 41% is still much higher than people who are rooting for abstinence would like.

I acknowledge that sex education does seem to be having a positive effect, a fact I did not know and was surprised to encounter as I wrote this article. However, I still believe abstinence is the way to go for a person, and I think schools should stress this. Religious beliefs aside, the harmful effects of sex outside of marriage are many, but that’s a topic for a different article.