Decisions about sex education are usually made at the state and local level — no federal laws dictate what sex education should look like or how it should be taught in schools.
Almost every state in the U.S. has some guidance around sex education. Currently, 39 states and the District of Columbia require that HIV and/or sex education is covered in school. However, there’s no guarantee that the sex education students get is high quality or covers the topics young people need to learn about to stay healthy.
Of the states that require sex and/or HIV education, fewer than half require it be medically accurate. And more states require sex education to stress abstinence than ensure medical accuracy. Fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools are teaching the sexual health topics that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers “essential” for healthy young people. This is unacceptable.
Lawmakers in statehouses and city halls are the ones making decisions about what is (and isn’t) taught in school-based sex education. That means they decide whether or not educators can discuss birth control, how educators can talk about LGBTQ+ experiences, and how much educators must stress abstinence.
While most states have some kind of law or policy about sex education, day-to-day decisions are often left up to individual school districts. This means that students in the same state attending different schools could have totally different sex education experiences.
Because sex education laws and policies are developed at the state and local level, sex education is constantly under attack. Politicians have used a variety of tactics to limit access to sex education, promote conservative agendas, and push Planned Parenthood sex educators out of schools.
These restrictive bills are just a way for politicians to block access to sexual and reproductive health information, education, and services — especially from Planned Parenthood.