When school started this year, a new state program also started. A program to teach a curriculum on adoption in health and sex education classes.

Already some 10,000 students in Grades 7 through 12 have seen the new presentations in their schools. News Specialist Pamela Davis has more.

It's a unique program. The people who coordinate it say they know of no other state that does the same thing.

It grew out of a concern at the state legislature about teenage pregnancy... And the idea that young women who get pregnant might be less likely to consider abortion if they knew more about modern adoption.

Some say that's good public policy -- others say it's self-righteous lawmaking by morality.

Either way, it's "Changing Sex Education."

Shelley Bennett is a volunteer with the Adoption Council of Utah. She was adopted when she was two weeks old.

This year, she's spent many hours in classrooms all across Utah, presenting the new state-mandated program on adoption. "Birth parents have a lot more rights than they used to," she tells students.

Why target junior high and high school populations with a pro-adoption message? Former State Legislator Craig Taylor explains, "That's the level where kids are starting to get pregnant."

Taylor introduced the bill in the 1998 State Legislature, to convince young people that adoption is a positive solution to an unwanted pregnancy.

"Many of them feel stuck between alternatives that they really don't want to have to deal with," he says. "That is - abortion, one, that they don't want, or on the other hand maybe raising a child on their own, in a welfare-type situation."

Bennett says, "Children are very expensive. And on $7.50 an hour, I don't know that you could even pay for diapers and clothes and formula."

The spectrum of sex education in Utah schools now includes, on one end -- abstinence. On the other, adoption. And in between? Some aspects of sex ed, such as birth control, are taught with parents' written permission. There is no school curriculum on abortion."

Beverley Cooper of Planned Parenthood of Utah says, "I think that it leaves a big hole in the middle."

Cooper says Planned Parenthood is a strong supporter of both abstinence and adoption. But she feels the current sex ed curriculum leaves something out.

"We have teens that are hearing about abstinence -- abstinence is the only form of birth control or family planning there is, and then they go into their classroom and they hear what to do should they find themselves pregnant. I'm wondering where the in-between is."

Some students say there's a mixed message sent by a curriculum that promotes both abstinence and adoption. Sophomore Melissa Avati told us, "It's saying it's okay to have sex, if you're going to put the baby up for adoption."

Aaron Tate, who is a junior, says, "You know, "don't have sex" and then it's "but if you do, then this is an option." Kinda makes it seem like it's okay, when it's really not."

Bonnie Peters of the Utah Adoption Council explains, "We are not saying it's okay to go out and have an intimate relationship, because then you can place the child for adoption. That is definitely not what we're saying."

Peters says -- if students choose not to abstain from sex, they should know they have another choice -- adoption.

Birth mother Jody Dixon recalls, "I was with this guy and he told me, 'I love you, I love you,' and I thought everything was going to go great. And one day I told him I was pregnant and boom, he was gone. That left me with the choice of what to do with this baby."

Dixon did choose to let another couple adopt her child and she says she feels it was the right decision.