ems of illegitimacy could be addressed through functional public policy (welfare reform) designed to combat illegitimate births and adolescent pregnancies. This meant abandoning the contraceptive approach to adolescent pregnancy in favor of the abstinence approach that “successfully incorporates the basic cultural and psychological realities of the transition to adulthood [b]y inculcating individual ‘resistance skills,’ abstinence becomes more firmly established the more widely it is applied” (Piccione and Scholle, 1995).Changes in Behavior EssentialCommon sense would seem to dictate that the proposal outlined by Piccione and Scholle (1995) would be as ineffective as Prohibition was in changing drinking habits. Piercy and Bailey (1996) outlined a program that was designed to develop a series of interactive HIV/AIDS prevention activities to teach HIV-related concepts and skills in the context of either the adolescent’s family or peer group. The first exercise was described under the heading “It’s Hard to Change Behavior,” and was designed to demonstrate that when people are accustomed to thinking and behaving in certain ways, it is sometimes difficult to change even simple behaviors; That change takes practice, not just wanting to change (Piercy and Bailey, 1996).Current Trends in Sex EducationAccording to the CQ Researcher, the current trend in sex education is to encourage abstinence while providing information relative to birth control. This would appear to be the most realistic response to the problem but educators and other adults must also realize that many teens are simply not as sexually savvy as one would assume, given the virtual bombardment by sexual material in the media. The extent of the education lag is made obvious in a section of “Birth Control and Contraception for Teenagers.” In the section addressing what causes a girl to become pregnant, the article in...
