Whereas some may argue that comprehensive sex education opens doors for earlier sexual encounters, comprehensive sex education is necessary given that while parents should be included in the teaching of sex education, sex education should be comprehensive and thorough and not give students all of the information that is reasonably necessary can have consequences such as teen pregnancy, higher STI and STD rates, and enforces potentially dangerous stereotypes. Currently, sex education within the state of Indiana, specifically, is teaching a curriculum that barely goes beyond reproductive systems, development up to adulthood, and how to say no to peer pressure and sex in general. It puts an unhealthy emphasis on abstinence and fails to teach students of any grade about safe sex practices, birth control, or the plethora of issues that can arise from the contraction of an STI or an STD. Nor does it teach how to handle these situations in the event a student is faced with one of these scenarios. Sex education has not always been this way, in fact, the original goal was indeed to inform students and prepare them for a world that has a lot to do with sex and the instances involved in maturing and dealing with the outcomes of having sex.
When World War I broke out in 94, nearly 5 million troops were deployed to Europe to fight in the war. Oftentimes, soldiers from several fronts would find themselves on leave near small towns and would travel short distances to take time off when they had the time available. With
plenty of young men to go around, brothels, prostitutes, and good-time girls found themselves busier than ever. This meant that there was a whole new breeding ground for diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis could find new hosts and would travel throughout the trenches, and since these diseases were not immediately noticeable, one could go weeks without knowing they were infected or that they were passing on the disease to others. Syphilis would come about as a painless chancre sore and would resolve itself spontaneously, whereas gonorrhea symptoms were painful and essentially would render a soldier unable to fight once these symptoms appeared. Instead of treating this as a health issue, the United States Government decided to treat these ailments as moral issues, thus making their prevention and treatment difficult to achieve (Venereal Diseases · Medicine in World War I · Online Exhibits@Yale, 209). The response from the government also included morally shaming soldiers who associated themselves with sex workers with posters, pamphlets, and other publications and enforcing an agenda that included such shaming and abstinence. Unfortunately, many of their reactions came too late and the damage had been done. The Chamberlain-Kahn Act did several things, including imprisoning women for simply having a venereal disease, as STIs and STDs were called at the time. However, its most important function was allocating funds to sex education, which was now being viewed as a public health issue by Americans.