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Faith Fluker’s cousin was a 14-year-old cheerleader and magnet school student when she became pregnant last year. She didn’t have to be such a young mom; she just lacked the means to avoid teen parenthood, Fluker said.
“She fell pregnant because she didn’t have access to reproductive health resources, and she didn’t have transportation to end the pregnancy, which is what she wanted to do,” said Fluker, an Auburn University senior who champions reproductive rights as part of her work with Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. “The lack of sex education in Alabama has led to teen pregnancies, both around me and all over the state.”
After her cousin’s pregnancy, Fluker saw what happened next: the interruption of the teen’s education, the depression she suffered and the judgment cast on her in a small town where sex is discussed in whispers.
Recent reports from the national nonprofit organization SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change suggest that youth across the country could find themselves in similar circumstances. The research indicates that the culture wars over comprehensive sex ed are intensifying, a development that could jeopardize the health, safety and future of today’s students.
This year, SIECUS’ Legislative Mid-Year Report tracked more than 650 bills introduced in statehouses, finding that about 25 percent of them aimed to restrict access to quality sex education. That marks a 35 percent increase from the previous year, a surge empowered by a White House under the influence of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s more is that SIECUS’ 2025 State Report Cards, which grade states on their sex education policies, paint a bleak picture. Over a quarter of states get Fs because of their failure to provide significant support for sex education.
“Sex education has long been at the forefront of battles within education,” said Alison Macklin, director of public affairs for SIECUS. But sex ed is overwhelmingly popular with the public. SIECUS has found that 89 percent of likely voters believe sex ed is important in middle school, and 98 percent agree it is in high school, while a 2023 Planned Parenthood poll revealed that 84 percent of parents support sex ed instruction in middle school, and 96 percent support it in high school.
Strong approval for the subject has hindered its foes from seeking to eliminate it outright, prompting them to use more subversive tactics to undermine it, Macklin said. “I think the opposition has really had to be more strategic in their attacks and really looking to whittle away components of sex education,” she continued. “We’ve seen. . . attacks around specifically LGBTQ+ individuals and more targeted towards transgender young people.”
SIECUS’s 2025 State Report Cards illustrate how fragmented sex education is across states, with some requiring no sex ed at all and others mandating that sex ed be comprehensive, medically accurate and inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. Combined, these factors are widely considered to be the gold standard for this curriculum. This year, SIECUS broadened its analysis to include instruction on issues such as menstrual health. But since their sex ed censors some of these topics or does not cover the subject matter in detail, most states received Cs, Ds and Fs. Just Washington, D.C., and six states — California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington — earned overall grades in the A range, meaning that their sex ed policies are robust, inclusive and scientifically sound.
A student’s place of residence shouldn’t determine whether they receive honest and inclusive information about their bodies and relationships, advocates say, but right now, it does. The uneven patchwork of sex ed offerings nationwide is glaring compared with other subjects schools teach, said Christian Pepper, a sex educator and coauthor of the new book “Talk To Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men.”
“If you were to visit an algebra class in Connecticut and then one in Alabama, they’d look pretty similar,” he said. “If you try to visit a sex ed class in different states, it’s going to look very different from place to place. Some states offer comprehensive sex ed, some offer abstinence-only, and some don’t offer it at all.”
The gaps in his high school sex ed class stood out to Alfred Vivar Muñoz, a political science major at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
“We learned about male and female anatomy, STIs and AIDS, but they didn’t really delve into them,” said Muñoz, co-lead of the Nevada Youth Activist Alliance, which fights for reproductive justice for young people in affiliation with Advocates for Youth. “I did not learn about healthy relationships, and I did not learn about contraceptives.”
SIECUS gave Nevada an overall grade of C+ in its 2025 State Report Cards. Although the state requires schools to teach sex education and evidence-based HIV/AIDS instruction, the curriculum is not required to cover sexual orientation or gender identity. Also, parents must provide written consent for their children to enroll in this coursework. Nevada lawmakers passed legislation this year that would have instead required parents to opt their children out of the classes, but Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed it.
Muñoz wondered whether his fellow college students would have lower rates of STIs — UNLV’s wastewater testing program found rising levels of chlamydia and gonorrhea near dorms last year — if they had access to better sex ed.
“There’s still a lot of misinformation,” he said.
SIECUS contends that omissions in the curriculum contribute to knowledge gaps around LGBTQ+ sexual health and pregnancy.
Many states don’t require sex ed to be medically accurate or LGBTQ+-inclusive. And some, like Florida and Texas, have also passed laws that forbid the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools generally.
Ericka Hart, a sex educator at Widener University who taught in New York City schools for over a decade and offers courses through her website, said sex ed that excludes certain groups harms all students.
“There’s no way to do sex ed without including LGBTQIA+ people. There’s just no way to do it,” she said. “For straight students, it adds a stigma to view queer people in a certain way. … For queer people, it becomes a challenge to live their everyday life, since they have to go to the internet and try to figure out those answers.”
Hart argues that this exclusion is rooted in a system that fears multilayered conversations around sexuality. Opponents to including queer people in the curriculum “don’t want to see critical conversations, critical thinking around these issues because that’s what information does,” they said. “It helps people think through and make decisions about their own health.”
The mandatory classroom viewings of fetal development videos such as “Baby Olivia” — which critics call medically inaccurate and visually misleading — also undermine the effort to give young people access to quality sex ed. State legislation has required students as young as third grade to watch the video created by the controversial anti-abortion group Live Action. As of June, seven states — Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Tennessee — had enacted “Baby Olivia” laws.
“It’s completely inappropriate for third graders,” Macklin said. “It’s directly going against what the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends. It’s got false information about developmental milestones for a fetus. It uses very inflammatory language. It’s a doctored ultrasound, so it’s like an AI-generated ultrasound. In itself, that is disinformation.”
The video, which posits that fetuses can recognize lullabies and stories, preys on the emotions of students who lack the knowledge to question its veracity, Live Action’s detractors argue. Many of the states that passed laws to require classroom viewings of the video have some of the nation’s most extreme abortion restrictions.
Overall, the “Baby Olivia” video is connected to a larger trend of state laws promoting censorship and erasure, often under the guise of “parental rights.” At the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services has threatened states with the loss of tens of millions of dollars if they don’t strike “gender ideology” from their sex education materials, SIECUS noted. When states give into such pressures, schools and educators are dissuaded from providing an inclusive and accurate curriculum.
“There’s a lot of fear and misinformation used,” Macklin said. “The opposition really uses these tactics to make parents think their rights are being taken away, when, of course, parents have rights when it comes to education; that’s already built into the system.”
Much of the fear parents have about sex ed stems from the idea that the curriculum is focused on the act of intercourse when comprehensive sex ed is largely designed to teach students about sexual health and relationship fundamentals. In countries like Australia and New Zealand, the course is known as “Relationships and Sexuality Education,” and the young people enrolled learn about safety as well as health.
“We teach about how to set boundaries. We teach about healthy relationships and how to watch out for warning signs of abusive relationships,” Pepper said of sex educators. “We talk a lot about consent — making sure that people are entering into situations in a consensual way, how to check for consent and how to respond if someone says no.”
Teaching students about consent as part of sex ed, Pepper said, can reduce rates of sexual violence, making communities safer. These lessons are crucial for boys, most of whom are well-meaning, he continued.
“They don’t want to harm anyone else. They don’t want to be creepy,” Pepper said. “They’re looking for guidance about how to navigate dating and relationships in a way that feels safe and consensual and fun for everyone involved.”
It is also imperative that boys and young men learn about contraception, instead of leaving the issue for young women alone to manage. Pepper teaches the boys in his classes about a wide range of options.
“If you have a sexual situation that could result in a pregnancy, that should not just be on the female partner,” Pepper said. “Both of those people should care about this. And you can’t make informed choices unless you have accurate information.”
Increasingly, state and district policies are requiring schools to not only provide students with basic information about puberty but also about menstrual health, regardless of gender. Forty-one bills, according to SIECUS, have been introduced to help students obtain free pads and tampons in schools.
“It’s so great to see these types of menstrual equity bills being passed,” Macklin said. “It allows for greater knowledge about the menstrual cycle for everybody.”
Nicole Reksopuro, a high school junior near Portland, Oregon, welcomes these legislative advances. She took her first sex ed course in middle school, describing the materials “as pretty high level.” Her state is one of the seven with an overall grade of A on the 2025 SIECUS State Report Cards. Oregon earned the high mark because it offers a comprehensive and LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum that also must teach about consent and not be fear- or shame-based. Moreover, parents must opt their kids out of the content rather than into it.
As grateful as she is to have received quality sex ed before high school, Reksopuro would have liked the course to go into more specifics. She learned about menstruation and healthy relationships, “but I wish they went deeper into personal hygiene,” she said via email. “I did appreciate that it helped me think critically about my body and how to take care of it.”
Once she entered high school, she received additional sex ed that reinforced what she learned in middle school and explored healthy relationships in greater detail.
“I still wish there was more about taking care of our bodies and more time spent on ways to set healthy boundaries with different people in our lives,” she said.
Reksopuro’s experience does not surprise sex educator Hart, who said that even in progressive states, the training teachers undergo in the subject is often lacking. Plus, the legacy of class and racial segregation means that marginalized students tend to get inferior sex ed, no matter their state.
“As a Black, queer, nonbinary person, I’m really curious as to what are your politics and your stance and your values beyond being a red or a blue state because a lot of times those colors bleed and start to look very similar,” she said.
As students and advocates in blue states push for refinements to their sex ed courses, activists like Fluker are working to give youth where they live access to basic contraception so they don’t become teenage parents.
Fluker once worked at an Alabama Walgreens and saw young people scrape together the cash to buy emergency contraceptive Plan B. That experience fuels her current work to get condoms into schools and community centers, but the effort is not without pushback. She has to justify to parents why she’s providing these products. “They obviously know that pregnancy is a consequence, but they don’t believe that their children are [sexually] active,” she said.
SIECUS gave Alabama an overall grade of C- on its 2025 State Report Cards. While the state requires sex ed to be medically accurate and students in grades 5-12 to receive instruction on HIV/AIDS, it does not demand that the curriculum include instruction on consent, sexual orientation or gender identity. Additionally, schools that teach sex ed must focus on abstinence, but parents can still prevent their children from taking the course.
Although Muñoz is across the country in Nevada, he can relate to Fluker’s experiences. He said that sex education has been stigmatized.
“It has been the villain of the story,” he said. “But I think these topics should be addressed before people go to university, just so they know what to watch out for, to know what’s healthy and what’s good.”
Some state lawmakers agree and are introducing legislation to strengthen sex ed rather than weaken the curriculum. They are presenting opt-out policies rather than opt-in ones. A rising number of state bills also focus on consent education, sexual violence prevention and protecting librarians and educators from censorship efforts.
“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Macklin said.
At the end of the day, the policies enacted will reflect what kind of future lawmakers and stakeholders want for young people — one where they enjoy safety, bodily autonomy and healthy relationships or one where they are vulnerable to coercion, infections and misinformation.
“We would never put one of my teenagers into a car without giving them the education they need to operate that car safely, whether I’m ready for them to operate the car or not,” Macklin said. “I think when we think about sexuality or sexual activity from that perspective, we can all agree as parents that we want our young people to be safe and we want them to make good decisions.”
Great Job Nadra Nittle & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
