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Comprehensive sexuality education is a sex education instruction method based on-curriculum that aims to give students the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and values to make appropriate and healthy choices in their sexual lives. The intention is that this understanding will prevent students from contracting sexually transmitted infections, such as HIV and HPV. CSE is also designed with the intention of reducing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, as well as lowering rates of domestic and sexual violence, thus contributing to a healthier society, both physically and mentally.
Comprehensive sexuality education ultimately promotes sexual abstinence as the safest sexual choice for young people. However, CSE curriculums and teachers are still committed to teaching students about topics connected to future sexual activity, such as age of consent, safe sex, contraception such as birth control pills, condoms, and the ending of pregnancy, when conception does occur, through abortion. This also includes discussions which promote safe behaviors, such as communicating with partners and seeking testing for sexually transmitted infections. Additionally, comprehensive sex education curricula may include discussions surrounding pregnancy outcomes such as parenting, adoption, and abortion. Some states have introduced bills to the legislature that would require all pre-existing sexuality education curricula in public schools to be fully comprehensive and inclusive. The most widely agreed benefit of using comprehensive sexuality education over abstinence-only sex education is that CSE acknowledges that the student population will be sexually active in their future. By acknowledging this, CSE can encourage students to plan ahead to make the healthiest possible sexual decisions. This ideology of arming students to most successfully survive their future sexual experiences underlies the majority of topics within CSE, including various methods of contraception and refusal skills.