by Bethany Trujillo

The first time I had sex, I got pregnant. I was fifteen years old and I didn’t have any feelings for the guy. We weren’t in a relationship and there were no emotional connections. I had sex with him because two weeks prior my best friend lost her virginity and I wanted to have the experience, too.  It took me two weeks to finally get a hold of the guy, and when he found out he didn’t take it very well.  He said that he didn’t want to be stuck with me for the rest of his life.

You can't imagine how hard it was to tell my mom that I was pregnant at the young age of fifteen. It shocked my mom because we had never discussed sex before.  But, it went better than I expected. She was mad, but understood. She told me that she would support me regardless of my decision.  She was afraid that I wouldn’t graduate high school or be as successful as I could be if I was raising a child.

Due to the lack of support from the guy and the obstacles I would face, I decided to have an abortion. After the abortion, I thought two things – One: Since I already lost my virginity, it didn’t matter anymore if I had sex. And two: Maybe if I gave guys sex they would stick around and try to get to know me. I was really promiscuous for about eight months. Then I realized this is not the way to find a guy who cared about me. So I stopped having sex. But not soon enough. Even though I always used condoms, I contracted an STD – Human Papaloma Virus.

My experience made me realize how much I was uninformed about sex, and I wasn’t the only one that was going through these things.  So my senior year, I decided to go on a mission to change sex education.

I created a whole new curriculum for my high school. It included the obvious stuff like safer sex practices. But it also included things that might have helped me -- like a focus on self esteem and its relationship to teen sex. It even included training for parents about how to effectively talk to their kids about sex. I took my curriculum to my high school’s freshman class.  It didn’t go as I had planned, due to the lack of parent involvement, which I felt was necessary for my curriculum to be fully interpreted.

The emotional side of dealing with sex and its consequences is too often left out of the classroom when it comes to sex ed. But understanding sex isn’t just about pregnancy and STD’s. No one prepared me for the emotional toll.

If I can save one student from getting hurt through this youth-driven sex ed curriculum, then I did it right.

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