It is the spring of 1970. A teacher is about to talk to my fellow seventh-graders and me about sex, an event so noteworthy that big, clunky Nixon-era video cameras are about to capture the spectacle.

It was apparently a pilot program that officials wanted to evaluate. The testing ground of our Maryland classroom apparently would determine the content of sex education classes for years to come.

I have no idea what the officials found, but I remember what they taught us.

We learned where babies come from. We all knew where babies come from, but most of the boys had never heard of a fallopian tube, so we got smart about girls' innards, and our own, when we covered the medical terms for things we referred to, um, differently.

So far, so good. Not a lot of giggling, and heaven knows we were paying attention.

Eventually, we got around to contraception. We were told that there were methods people used to prevent pregnancy. Some were natural, like the flawed but admirable "rhythm method," and some involved technology, like condoms and IUDs.

There was not a word spoken about abstinence, yet none of us felt spurred to go out and start having sex.

That may be because we were 12, but even as we grew older, I never felt that the school's failure to tell me not to have sex meant that I should start having sex. My parents handled that quite well, thank you, so I was sufficiently served by a sex ed curriculum that stuck with the nuts and bolts, so to speak.

Too few kids were similarly blessed as the '70s unfolded, and each decade since has been filled with a dilemma for the ages: While we're spending all this time telling kids about the mechanics of sex, shouldn't we tell them about the profoundly ill wisdom of actually doing it?

Here in the young 21st century, abstinence has taken a proper place in many sex ed curricula around the country, so the debate shifts: Should we teach only abstinence? Doesn't contraceptive information provide a nudge toward sexual activity?

"We don't tell kids how to drive drunk," a local school board official once told me. "We tell them, 'Don't do it.' "

That made sense to me for a while. We should indeed deliver a "don't do it" message in every sex ed class. But does that mean we have to graduate kids who have no clue what contraception is?

Abstinence-only policies are an understandable attempt to counteract what seems like a "get out there and do it" message that reaches out to our kids from many corridors of our culture. If only we could dilute that, the logic goes, maybe we could reduce teen pregnancies.

Except that since Texas now leads the nation in teen births, maybe it doesn't do it well enough. Our rate has dropped, but not nearly as much as in states that manage to combine abstinence messages with objective contraception information.

One state that has seen its teen birth rates drop precipitously is California, which has scoreboarded us with a 47 percent drop in teen births, compared to our 19 percent. Once we get over the shock of being bested on a societal criterion by California, it might be time for some introspection here in Texas, the land of supposedly better morals.

The good news is that those morals are not compromised by telling Johnny there is such a thing as a rubber. It has to be done right; the abstinence message should be clear and compelling, hitting kids right where they live in terms of how an unplanned baby can mess up your prom plans – and your life plans.

If that message is delivered well, as it apparently is in many other states, it is possible to inform kids about contraceptive options while making it clear they are not to start using them until later in life.

Many kids will heed the abstinence call. I wish more did, and we can achieve that goal by maintaining a strong emphasis on the "don't do it" message. But for those who are going to be dumb enough to ignore that message, I want their odds for making a baby reduced.