http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1886558,00.html
Jewels Morris-Davis is a no-nonsense kind of girl. When the high school sophomore turned 16 recently, she didn’t celebrate with any My Super Sweet 16 foolishness. Nor did she rush to get her driver’s license and race around the back roads in this rural northwest corner of South Carolina. But Jewels did quietly revel in one achievement. “I am,” she says a few weeks later, a proud smile spreading across her face, “the first person in my family to reach 16 without getting pregnant–or getting somebody pregnant.”
Five years ago, Jewels was firmly on track to continue the family tradition of early parenthood. Her mother is a drug addict, and the grandmother who raised her had just died of cancer. Shifted to a foster home, Jewels turned to sex to find the love and attention her absent family couldn’t provide. “I was lost,” she says simply. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
South Carolina is the only state in the country that mandates a certain number of hours that schools must devote to sexuality education. In 2004, Jewels’ school district in Anderson County decided to do even more. The district partnered with a local teen-pregnancy-prevention organization to implement an innovative relationship and sex-education curriculum that runs through all three years of middle school and into high school, as well as an after-school program for at-risk kids. And that’s when the life of Jewels Morris-Davis began to turn around.
Later this spring, Congress will dive once more into the war over sex education when it decides whether to eliminate $176 million in federal funding for so-called abstinence-only programs, which instruct kids to delay sex until marriage. Advocates will debate at top volume the merits of abstinence-only efforts vs. more comprehensive programs that also teach about birth control and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).