Birth control for 11-year-olds?

The Portland Press Herald ran an article this morning about a proposal at King Middle School for junior high students to be able to receive birth control prescriptions from the school’s health center.
This proposal, which aims to help students who are sexually active make safe choices, is one of the latest moves in the highly charged, polarized debate about sex education for teens and pre-teens. The debate is inextricably intertwined with moral and religious values as all groups realize the importance of some sort of sex education in order to prevent teen pregnancy and the transmission of STDs.
But what is the best sort of sex education? Is it better to have an abstinence-only policy, or should educators and parents give children and teens comprehensive sex education? And how young is too young to start talking about sex?
In a July 2006 article in the Missourian, Maureen Coy, a social service specialist with the Columbia/Boone County Health Department, says ninth-grade sex education class is sometimes too late to intervene as teen sexuality continues to develop at younger and younger ages.
On the other hand, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy also reported that religious faith is the number one important factor among teens in the decision to delay having sex as churches teach that abstinence before marriage is morally correct.
Although the teen pregnancy rate has dropped significantly in the past decade, the United States still has the highest birth rate among developed nations according to the CDC, with 4 out of 10 girls getting pregnant at least once before age 20, according to a 2001 report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
What do you think? Where and how should we draw the lines on sex education for teens and pre-teens? Is the proposal in Maine going too far? Let me know what you think.