Some Florida Teens Believe Drinking Bleach Prevents HIV

Some Florida teenagers believe that drinking Mountain Dew or smoking Marijuana will prevent pregnancy and that drinking a capful of bleach will prevent HIV/AIDS. These beliefs are believed to have been spread because of Florida’s abstinence-only sex education.

Under a proposed legislation, schools would be required to teach abstinence as sure way to prevent pregnancies and STD's, but they would also be required to teach more about sex. They would need to teach about condoms and other methods of birth control and STD prevention.

The bill needs to be passed in a 60-day legislative session that is, by now, nearly half over. Then the bill would need to pass three more comities before even making it to the Senate floor.

Opponents to the bill said that the bill would result in more teen pregnancies. These opponents include the anti-abortion activists. "The only healthy, 100-percent effective way to prevent disease and pregnancy is abstinence", said Alison Lambrechts, a field coordinator for Project Reality, which provides sexual, alcohol and drug abstinence materials for schools

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton, said Florida's current approach isn't working because the state has the sixth-highest teen pregnancy rate nationally. He showed that a University of Florida study showed that the state’s sex programs vary widely in content and get very little class time, if any. Half of the middle schools and a third of the high schools only teach abstinence courses.

Jenna Cawley, the director for Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando, states: “Young people are getting too little information too late”.