To think adolescents should be taught more about childbirth in school?

[magicalmama]

The point of sex education is to stop children being left ignorant of something that can affect them so deeply, so shouldn't we be giving adolescents, and especially girls, more information in school about what giving birth, something dangerous, life changing and also incredibly common, could be like?

So many women post about childbirth and wondering what it's like and how it feels, and many are afraid and ignorant. In a similar vein, lots of people post about trying to get pregnant where all we teach kids in school is how not to get pregnant, with little or not concern about what happens when you do want to get pregnant or if you leave it too late and things like that. It seems a bit counterproductive to leave such a big blindspot in education.

AIBU to think pregnancy and childbirth and what it's like, its consequences, something a lot of women worry about, should be taught about in a lot more detail in school along with sex ed?

At my secondary (early 90s) we were taught about several contraceptive methods yet at least 4 girls were pregnant when we sat our GCSEs.
We also had big discussions on abortion so no one could say they didn't know what one was.
All those girls had their babies and kept them.
So having the knowledge doesn't actually stop the actions does it?

I learned this over 40 years ago. A video of a woman giving birth - it was an incredibly easy birth in retrospect but we girls all declared we were never having kids if that was what childbirth was like. A tiny bit about how breast is best with a video of a baby squirming up to its mothers breast after being born and just latching on. So I got the idea breastfeeding is incredibly easy and the baby will just latch on.

The overwhelming evidence is that sex education does reduce teenage pregnancies.

For all you know there would have been 8 teen mums if there were no sex ed. There may well have been several abortions that you didn't know about.

@titchy that's a very good point.

Teaching sex ed is already tricky enough.
You will have children in that class who have suffered SA, who have had siblings who have been still born or whose parents have miscarriages, children who were born via IVF or whose families have experienced infertility, occasionally a child might have been pregnant or had an abortion. Some are happy to talk about such topics and IVf is often brought up and if the child brings it up it will be spoken about sensitively but many aren't and fitting it in between food tech and lunchtime isn't appropriate. Such delicate subjects need TLC to be discussed and that's just the children, many staff members will have direct experience and not be in a position to talk about it whilst managing the behaviour of 30 students.