Abstinence and Education

My experience with education and abstinence may be very different than some. I went to an all girls catholic highschool and before that to a catholic middle school. Since in the catholic church they like to teach abstinence until marriage that is all I was taught in school. Basically what happened in highschool if a girl was pregnant they were not allowed to talk about their baby, bring pictures of any sort, and just act as if they were not even barring a child. It was as if my school was turning the other cheak and was trying to be blinded by the situation that people do participate in sex before marriage. This then to me resulted in more of my classmates and other students in my highschool to get pregnant. So, just teaching us abstinence was clearly not working because today about twelve of the girls from my class have children and a few are on their second child. I believe just because I went to a catholic school does not mean that our education system has to ignore the fact that this is happening in the world. I think if they would have taught us more about protection and maybe even had a course that was mandatory to take more girls would have made smarter choices and used some sort of protection. It is dangerous in the world today to be ignorant and blind to this situation because I believe it is only going to continue to get worse until something changes. Another thing though that people need to understand is that the parents of children need to educate their children too. As for myself, my mom is a nurse and has been for 30 years. She has seen as young as a 11 year old come in to deliver a baby. Since my mom is a nurse and has seen this going on for years she was able to educate my sister and I about what could happen to us. She was open about everything and told us that if we were engaging in these actions that steps needed to be taken in order to prevent a pregnancy from happening. She then also, told us about STDs and how this would affect our lives long term. She was very blunt and upfront with us which was smart because I feel that, that is the only way the point will get directly across. So my questions for you all are: 1) Did anyone else go to a catholic school and was only abstinence taught to you? What effects did this have on people that went to your school? Negative or Positive? 2) Should the school system recieve all the blame for not properly educating students about sex and stds? or should the parents be to blame also?