Call it ironic, but the combined oral contraceptive pill recently celebrated its fiftieth “birthday” of approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States in 1960. From a controversial renegade to a commonplace form of birth control worldwide, “the pill” has come a long way, and boy, do we love it. YAZ, a popular oral contraceptive, advertises its product with young women enjoying the responsibility of habitual birth control, and the .1 percent chance of being pregnant. They prance down the street in brightly colored clothing and make sexy quick changes in the back of taxis.

Who’s to blame them? Young college women can be carefree and sexually active, some starting earlier than others. Though sexual freedom varies from person to person, options like oral contraceptives exist for a reason: no more do women feel constrained to a big analogous family at the age of 25.

“Yaz is not for everyone,” the advertisements caution. That’s for sure. Artificial birth control is a moral sin according to some religions, and the especially opposed with make that clear. Consider the opinion of the Catholic Church, conveyed by Pope Paul VI in 1968:

“It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects. And since in the attempt to justify artificial methods of birth control many appeal to the demands of married love or of responsible parenthood, these two important realities of married life must be accurately defined and analyzed” (Paul IV, Humanae Vitae, 1968)

Catholic consent relies on giving what God gave women and men, and that’s baby-making bodies. Woman and man become mother and father, and mother and father teach their children their kindred beliefs. But someday, those children will meet other children; they will hit puberty, and suddenly it’s not black and white anymore. How do we, as all-knowing adults, address this “problem”?

Sexual education in the United States varies with the laws of each state, but starting around six or seventh grade most students receive some form. Those who don’t rely on comprehensive sex education fight respond with abstaining from sex until marriage.

Basking in its own glow of conservative methods, abstinence promotes morality and places virginity on a pedestal—something to be “saved,” they say. How are thirteen-year-olds expected to have their own opinion about something they have never experienced, and are only recently equipped to understand? If the logistics of sexual maturity aren’t explained at neither school nor home, adolescents will figure it out for themselves. And misunderstanding effective birth control is the best way to lead to teenage pregnancy.

I speak of this confusion from experience. I attended a private Catholic school for eight years with one session of sexual education in its entirety. Locking up fifty pre-adolescents in a room with a devout Catholic woman and her merry pair of two abstinent young adults, their message consisted only of this: a solid relationship cannot be formed with sex before marriage, so don’t even think about it.

Never having received the proper education, I had no idea how to use birth control correctly, and did all my research on my own via the World Wide Web, some websites more valid than others. “Birth control is awesum,” “U shuld take THIS kind of pill,” in the manner of illegitimate forum posts. To this day, I am still finding out details about contraceptives that I should have known from the beginning.

My method of researching the pill is admittedly dangerous, and I would never recommend it to anyone. But had I received appropriate education in the first place, I wouldn’t be making risky steps like trusting misspelled reviews of Yaz written by anonymous sources.

Religious schools have every right to teach morality and its connection of giving sex its deserved significance, but evidently, abstinence-only education doesn’t prevent teenage pregnancy. Though the pregnancy rate of 15-19 year olds has dropped in the past fifteen years, it is enough to create TV shows based on pregnant teenagers. These adolescents have got it tough now because they weren’t taught correctly in the first place. If sexual education becomes more than an awkward, rushed lecture by a gym teacher, students could receive legitimate education about having responsible sex. If students weren’t discouraged from asking important questions, and had the resources to do so, Americans could avoid unwanted pregnancies in a momentous way.

Over the past fifty years, globe-trotting women around the world, regardless of their moral status, altered their mindset of the “perfect” family, discovering a world of opportunities beyond a family of eight. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to promote the convenience of “the pill” to us college women, so that we can take advantage of life’s chances now. The more prepared we are, the more prepared the next generation will be. The oral contraceptive deserves its recognition as a revolutionary drug that challenged what we consider the ideal lifestyle.