A bill is moving through the Wisconsin state legislature that would allow public schools to teach abstinence-only sexual education programs. Senate Bill 237 repeals several aspects of a law enacted last year called the Healthy Youth Act.

Under the Healthy Youth Act, schools can choose not to offer a sexual education program, but they then must notify parents that such a program is not being provided at the school. At the same time, the law requires schools that do provide such a program to inform parents of the curriculum, and parents can choose to have their children opt out if they wish.

Supporters of SB 237 want to promote marriage as the place for sexual activity and tell students that abstinence is the only reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. What these supporters seem to be forgetting, however, is that the Healthy Youth Act already requires instructors to teach “the benefits of and reasons for abstaining from sexual activity” and to “stress the value of abstinence as the most reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.”

The Healthy Youth Act already requires most of what the supporters of its repeal claim to want.

The bill also states that local officials should be able to design their own classes because “values differ among school districts.”

We do not disagree, but the Healthy Youth Act, while establishing firm guidelines for the curriculum, already allows districts some flexibility to do this.

When boiling it down, the main goal the supporters of SB 237 seem to have is to revert back to a system wherein public schools can provide abstinence-only education once again.

That is something we do not support.

Abstinence-only education is an outdated method of sexual education. Whether we like it or not, we live in a highly sexualized culture. Children are exposed to sexual content at a very young age. In Wisconsin, 45 percent of high school students reported having had sexual intercourse, according to study by the Department of Health Services.

At the same time, Milwaukee’s teen birth rate has dropped from 52 per 1,000 in 2006 to 35.7 per 1,000 in 2010. The drop could be linked to a program launched in 2008 by the city and the United Way of Greater Milwaukee that educates youth about abstinence and contraception. While it is impossible to attribute this drop to one particular program or another, it seems counter-intuitive to enact opposite measures after a period of improvement.

We do recognize abstinence is the only reliable way to avoid pregnancy and STDs, but the Healthy Youth Act does too.

We also recognize parents have a right to determine for themselves at what age their children receive information about sex and what information that is. And so does the Healthy Youth Act, which requires that parents see the curriculum and allows parents to take their children out of the program if they do not agree with it.

But the public schools in Wisconsin need to support the children whose parents are not going to talk to them about sex. There will be children in our schools who have never been taught the risks of sexual activity. There will be children who have been taught these risks but are going to engage in sexual activity anyway. And the public schools need to be able to provide comprehensive information to arm them for decisions that can impact the rest of their lives.

Moral and social reasons aside, we are currently still in the midst of an economic recession. If students are better educated about both abstinence and birth control, there will be fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer mothers dependent on the welfare system (which costs taxpayer dollars) and fewer children growing up in poverty. Milwaukee in particular, as one of the most impoverished cities in the country, should be seeking more ways to make these things happen.

For the betterment of our city and our state, we do not support the allowance of abstinence-only education programs in public schools. Wisconsin’s youth deserve to be held to a higher standard by their elected officials and given a comprehensive range of information to make informed decisions about sex.