 "Photo: Andrea Marquise")
 "Photo: Justine Cantu")
 "Photo: Andrea Marquise")
While about half of teens are sexually active, 16-year-old Sarah Rabke does nothing more than kiss.
To Rabke, sex is precious. To her, "it is something that once you give away, you can't get it back."
To this Clark High School junior, being abstinent goes along with having strong morals and values.
"I think it's dangerous to give such a big thing away to other people," Rabke said.
A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sex education experts concerned that fewer teens are choosing the same path as Rabke. The study showed a leveling off in the number of teens who wait to have sex. It also showed a slight drop in the number of teens across the U.S. using condoms, although condom use among Texas teens is up.
Dr. Janet Realini is medical adviser at Project WORTH, a teen pregnancy prevention program run by the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.
She is not sure why more teens are not choosing abstinence or at least choosing to use condoms.
"The answer is not definitively known, but there are some things we do know: Young people are bombarded by unhealthy sexual messages in our society, and we need to use proven, effective methods to help them make decisions," she said.
She supports abstinence-plus in her clinic. Abstinence-plus teaches the original concept of abstinence along with information about contraception and condoms.
"I think we can help more young people to wait to have sex. It's doable and possible. It's a strong message that we should give," she said.
Sandy Doughton is the director of health promotion and outreach at Planned Parenthood.
Her program also teaches abstinence-plus.
"Half of the teenagers in the category of sophomores through seniors in high school are sexually active," she said.
According to Doughton, funding for abstinence-based sex education has been around $1.5 billion nationally, but so far, no research has showed that it has been working.
In San Antonio, some school districts teach abstinence-plus sex education while others teach abstinence only, providing only information about failure rates for condoms and contraceptives.
In 2006, Project WORTH conducted a survey and asked San Antonio parents about sex education.
The study shows that 80 percent of parents lean toward abstinence-plus being taught to their teenagers in school, while 13 percent prefer abstinence-only, 2.5 percent would like neither of the classes, and 5 percent of parents would like their teens to receive some other type of sex education.
Rabke's choice to be abstinent was influenced by her church's youth group. This lifestyle choice allows her parents to invest more trust in her and gain a new kind of respect from previous and future boyfriends as well as her peers. Not to mention the respect she maintains for herself.
Rabke believes the teenage view of sex is selfish.
"It's not something they want for you; it's something they want for themselves."
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