Others are not convinced.

“In Texas, since when did we think it was a good idea to adopt any policy from California?” said Jonathan Saenz, president of Texas Values, which promotes abstinence-focused sex education. “I don’t think the proper measure is how do we compare to other states,” he added. “It’s undeniable that not only in our state but across the country, teen birthrates are at historic lows.”

The real problem, he said, was the glamorization of sex.

Allison Field, the founder of a Dallas nonprofit called Alley’s House, which provides education and mentoring to teenage mothers, said it was not uncommon in Texas to see 19-year-olds with four children. The organization works to break the cycle of teenage parenthood and to pick up slack from health and education systems that Ms. Field says are “failing our girls.”

During the 2011 legislative session, lawmakers cut two-thirds of the state’s family planning budget, leading to the closure of dozens of family planning clinics.

Carly Caraway, the Alley’s House program director, was a teenage mother. She said teenage mothers often lack a vision for their futures. “I didn’t even know college was a possibility,” said Ms. Caraway, a high school dropout who earned a college degree in social work after receiving assistance at Alley’s House.

Like many teenage mothers, Ms. Carbs was not the first in her family, though she had no intention of following that path. She and her boyfriend had been together for four years before they had sex — her first time, Ms. Carbs said. “I got on the patch and waited two months,” she said of birth control. “I still came up pregnant.”

Ms. Carbs could not recall sex education at school.

Texas allows school districts to decide whether and how to approach sex education, as long as they teach more about abstinence than about any other preventive method, like condoms.

Most Texas school districts teach abstinence-only sex education, which Mr. Saenz said was clearly working because Texas’ teenage birthrate had declined. A small but growing percentage of districts are adding contraception information to the curriculum — 25.4 percent in the 2010-11 school year, compared with 3.6 percent three years earlier — according to a 2011 report by the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates sex education that includes medically accurate information about contraception.