Dive Brief:

• Louisiana's House Education Committee voted 10-3 against a bill that would have required public schools to teach comprehensive sex education.  
• The law was proposed by Rep. Pat Smith (D-Baton Rouge) due to concern over the state's high teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates. While the bill would have still pushed abstinence as the safest and most effective form of birth control, it would have also required health classes to include information on contraceptives.  
• Many social conservative groups testified against Smith's bill, saying that parents should be the ones in charge of a child's sex education.  

Dive Insight:

On the same day the committee shut down Smith's bill, it approved a different measure requiring students to be educated on sexual assaults.

"There is no way in the world you can teach about sexual assault without teaching sex education," said Smith, who believed her bill was very much tied to the sexual assault bill. 

When Smith introduced the bill in March, she called the lack of mandated sex education “a form of child abuse.” Louisiana is among the states with the highest teen pregnancy and STD rates in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2012 Surveillance Report.