John Noble (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jackofallgeeks) wrote2006-11-28 05:29 am
jackofallgeeks) wrote2006-11-28 05:29 am
AIDs Prevention
From This article on an increasing trend in AIDs infections:
Simply focusing on treatment or politically uncontroversial prevention methods will not suffice. "You can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket," said Hays. "We need a menu of strategies for real people," he said, adding that condom distribution as well as new methods, such as a vaccine, are needed.
OK, so we all know my personal stance here, but I'm honestly curious: I hear a lot of talk about condoms and the like as a means of 'safe sex,' but I've never seen any statistics on it. Generally I take all statistics with a grain of salt anyways (too many ways to bend the numbers, in my opinion), but I know there's still a chance of pregnancy when using condoms, so I'm just curious what things look like numerically on AIDs prevention.
And I'll be honest, what bothers me the most about the "can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket" quip is the implication that we as humans generally lack the self-control to not sleep around. I mean, we're not really talking about a religious issue here any more -- the answer to "what's wrong with having sex" is no longer "God doesn't like it," it's "you could get AIDs and die." One would imagine that's a big enough stick to get most people to at least think about who they're sleeping with -- at the very least you shouldn't sleep with someone you know is sick, right? And you certainly shouldn't sleep with someone you can't trust is being honest about their sexual history. So... yeah. That's my thought for the moment.
Simply focusing on treatment or politically uncontroversial prevention methods will not suffice. "You can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket," said Hays. "We need a menu of strategies for real people," he said, adding that condom distribution as well as new methods, such as a vaccine, are needed.
OK, so we all know my personal stance here, but I'm honestly curious: I hear a lot of talk about condoms and the like as a means of 'safe sex,' but I've never seen any statistics on it. Generally I take all statistics with a grain of salt anyways (too many ways to bend the numbers, in my opinion), but I know there's still a chance of pregnancy when using condoms, so I'm just curious what things look like numerically on AIDs prevention.
And I'll be honest, what bothers me the most about the "can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket" quip is the implication that we as humans generally lack the self-control to not sleep around. I mean, we're not really talking about a religious issue here any more -- the answer to "what's wrong with having sex" is no longer "God doesn't like it," it's "you could get AIDs and die." One would imagine that's a big enough stick to get most people to at least think about who they're sleeping with -- at the very least you shouldn't sleep with someone you know is sick, right? And you certainly shouldn't sleep with someone you can't trust is being honest about their sexual history. So... yeah. That's my thought for the moment.
no subject
There are really a few separate issues that folks like me have with the ab-only programs, in rough order of good-faith-ness:
1. Abstinence *only* doesn't seem to work that well as a strategy for preventing teen pregnancy and STDs. The big longitudinal studies are still in progress (since widespread public ab-only education in the US is largely a product of the Bush administration), but preliminary data indicates that kids who get ab-only education seem to delay the onset of first sexual activity a *little* but then are much less likely to use protection (or use it properly) when they *do* have sex. M can rattle off all sorts of data on this, so if you really want numbers I can ask her for some links tonight. Basically, ab-only programs don't succeed in getting kids to wait long enough to only have sex with one partner for their whole lives, and then you get all the other problems in spades because the system doesn't fail gracefully.
2. *Some* ab-only programs have church/state issues. That is, some of them put out materials that say things like, "Jesus doesn't want you to have sex." A lot of the stuff getting Title V federal funding has turned out to have this problem. There's a big debate about the faith-based initiatives in general, how far is too far, etc. But basically, folks like me don't like having federal money used to teach kids Christianity in school. The response from most of the programs that do it has fanned the flames - there's a lot of "Christ is the only way to purity and this is a Christian country so STFU g-dless Hollywood secularists" sort of stuff. And then of course the ACLU gets involved and everyone is shouting.
3. Some (a distressing amount) of the ab-only programs not only don't provide accurate information about contraception, etc. but actively provide medically inaccurate information. This ranges from relatively grey-area stuff like, "condoms are only 85% effective, so that means that you're running a 15% chance of getting an STD every time you use one" (OK, maybe they misread the stat) and "abortions increase your risk of breast cancer" (pretty well debunked, but not everyone reads the JAMA) to really out-there things like "condoms don't prevent any STDs at all" (see one of the above comments) and "abortion will definitely give you breast cancer."
There's a lot of rhetoric on both sides, to be sure. Some folks on my side can be pretty hair-trigger about any mention of abstinence, e.g. But most folks (at least most policy-wonk folks, the people I know) are in favor of encouraging abstinence for younger folks, but want to equip them with the knowledge of how to protect themselves when/if they do have sex. To return to the car analogy - I don't want my 14 year old driving, but refusing to teach her how to use a seat belt is probably not the best response.
And so, I'm not saying that there are no potential harms from going out and having sex, especially emotional ones for younger people who have a less-sturdy sense of themselves. All I was saying is that, minus a moral conviction that extramarital sex is in-itself an evil, protecting people from harm indicates both encouraging them to avoid dangerous behavior and helping them mitigate the risks of that behavior if they don't avoid it because they decide that they would like the potentially-risky good (like skiing, or driving, or eating sushi), and so "just don't have sex" isn't an adequate basis for public policy. It might be a perfectly acceptable way to live one's own life.