The teaching of safe sex and the encouragement of abstinence is in almost every curriculum for nearly every middle and high school in the country. However, in Portland, Maine, King Middle School will now be offering birth control to girls as young as 11 years old.

Are these people serious? Birth control for 11-year-olds? They say it is due to a rise in pregnancies among middle school girls and they want to prevent further growth to this statistic. What they are really doing is feeding the monster that can eventually envelope these young girls and decrease their feeling of self worth, confidence and self respect.

Eleven years old is simply too young of an age to have sex. I would even go as far to say that 16 years old is too young. Indeed, the relative age depends on the maturity of the individual and their morals and values, but physically and mentally, middle school-aged children should not be encouraged. These girls are still developing, and they are at a point in their lives when they begin to discover who they are and who they want to be. They are making decisions about who their friends should be, what’s right and what’s wrong, and they are choosing for themselves the path they want to take. While sex should be taught to these developing minds, it should not be encouraged.

What I don’t think these school officials and parents understand is that they are not giving these girls birth control so that they and their 11-year-old boyfriends can have safe sex (those young boys probably don’t even know how to work it). They are giving them birth control so that these young girls and their adult boyfriends can have safe sex. It sounds irrational, I’m sure, but in reality there are men out there in every city in every state that are preying on young girls around the age of 13. I’ve seen it in rural Wisconsin, and parents are either too wrapped up in their mid-life crises, divorces or careers to pay attention to what their children are doing.

Young girls with no feeling of safety and security go looking for an outlet from which to receive what they are not being given by their parents, and they all too often find older men. Being young and naïve, these girls want to believe in and do whatever their older and “more mature” boyfriends want to do. Dating an older man makes them feel more mature and seems to boost their self esteem.

The danger is not only in the encouragement of underage sex and the damage that this kind of behavior can have on young, developing girls; it’s also in the encouragement of pedophilic behavior. As if these emotionally-confused girls weren’t already at risk from themselves, let’s add a grown man and give them the power to have “safe sex.”

I’d like to offer an alternative solution to the problem of teenage pregnancy for these parents and for the future parents of our society; be a parent. Ask, talk, learn and for God’s sake listen to your children. Stop thinking about yourselves for one second and think about the children you are raising and their mental and physical health. It’s just another way that America is failing in education by only looking for ways to mask a problem rather than take the time to learn and talk about the issue and then educate with reason. With the information available on sex and safe sex and the ability for us as humans to communicate, it is kind of disgusting to see the amount of children in America who are being left behind.