The Personal AIDS Story Column

Earlier this week there was a column in the Milwaukee paper by a gay reporter with AIDS. He had covered the AIDS pandemic for most of his professional career. As with many who get a bad diagnosis, he sunk into denial that he had HIV/AIDS. It just couldn't happen to him. But, he obviously had put himself at risk. He had multiple partners and was with a new one, he might even love. Even with condoms, which he never claimed to use, his risk was still high for infection with a deadly disease. He made choices that aren't turning out too well.

The problem is our STD/HIV prevention strategy relies on information to keep people safe from risk behaviors. It is assumed that if we just give people the facts they will make informed decisions. This was a man who should have had all the facts since it was his job to convey them. Yet, this professional journalist didn't use the knowledge to avoid the disease even though he was a member of the highest risk group. So how do we expect teenagers to make decisions based on information when their brains aren't even mature enough to analyze the information?

We have a health policy based on risk reduction, not disease prevention. A condom is touted as the panecea for STD/HIV. The danger is in biased information; facts about condom effectiveness and real life usage are skipped to "manipulate" people to use condoms.

AIDS is still a killer in most of the world. 85% condom effectiveness rate isn't much of a safety net for anyone who has multiple partners or just one infected partner. Choose the wrong sexual behavior and you will pay. That is the truth. I have a feeling that was a piece of information that reporter never mentioned. You protect what is important to you--for many people, it's the sex; not how many people get the diseases. Millions of lives just aren't enough to sacrifice, I guess, for the sexual thrill.

Thank You, Senator Lazich, Rep. Gundrum, etc

Yesterday, Governor Doyle signed into law (Act 445) a bill that sets an objective for sex ed in Human Growth and Development classes if a school district chooses to teach the subject. Sen. Mary Lazich had the fortitude to keep this bill on course despite heavy criticism. An Op Ed piece in the Milwaukee Journal even pointed out that only in Madison would such a benign bill cause so much controversy.

Specifics in the bill are:

• "Abstinence from sexual activity must be presented as the preferred choice of behavior in relationship to all sexual activity for unmarried pupils"
• Emphasis must be given that "abstinence from sexual activity before marriage is the most effective way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS"

This bill does not mean that abstinence is the only approach that can be taught but it clearly delineates that emphasis must be placed on abstinence. We now have a tool to use to influence those in state governmental departments who are only just beginning to give the abstinence message more than a passing nod. The next task is to help them understand that abstinence is not "just say No" as they continue to assume. Abstinence is a lifestyle that requires saying "Yes" to one's future, and adults need to guide students towards happy, healthy choices that improve their lives, their families, and communities.

But the mere fact that a value and parameter has been put on sexual behavior is a victory for our youth. This is a huge change from the idea that values can only come from the home and each person self-defines those, as was argued by Planned Parenthood representatives at the Senate hearing.

Washington Post Series on Teen Sex

Circulated by listserv to all health, education and government agencies involved in sex education, pregnancy and disease prevention, the Washington Post series is more than alarming. The premise is that the United States is creating its teen pregnancy and STD rates because it does not value sexual activity as acceptable, normative, pleasurable behavior for adolescents. If we just accepted this enlightened perspective as the Swedes have, there could be an uncontested campaign for contraception and condoms that would cause our rates of pregnancy and infection to plummet.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) helped frame this series using data from the mid-90s from the US and Western European countries. No mention was made of the fact that statistical data has been an unreliable, disorganized hodgepodge in Europe. Meetings within the European Union have been held for several years in an attempt to standardize the continent's health reporting systems. The impression given is that kids in European nations have great sex without any worries because fewer get pregnant or have diseases than in the United States. And that happens because of the liberal distribution of free condoms and cheap contraceptives.

However, in the mid-2000's, a different story started to emerge. In April, the Netherlands announced a 22% increase in HIV diagnoses and 15% jump in Chlamydia in one year. England acknowledged an STD epidemic of "astonishing" proportions in 2002. Since the mid-90s, London is reporting 75% increase in gonnorhea and a 141% increase in chlamydia among girls 16-19. Between 1999-2003, syphillis rose by 211% with 2/3 of the infections occurring in heterosexual men.

Once again, AGI chose what to report and eliminated a few important qualifiers to their data including that it is 1/3 of sexually active U.S. girls that become pregnant, not all teen girls. What does not appear in any of the series articles is mention of the societal transformation in these countries: marriage rates are plummeting along with the birth rates, nationalities are no longer replacing their elderly populations with children, reproducing immigrant groups are straining the national finances and services and obliterating national identities, financial security is iffy, religion is on the decline. There are other impacts of teen sex than pregnancy and disease rates that could have been included.

I hope adults will read the rash of new articles and studies with a very critical eye. The question needs to be asked of teachers, health professionals and government types "Is your motivation for working with my child a belief that sex is an acceptable part of adolescent development?" The answer will let you know the influence your child will be under because if there is no context for sex for an adolescent, there can be none for anyone else either.

Thanks to Journal of Adolescent Health

John Santelli and company finally put in print what is really at the core of the entire sex education debate. The gist of the argument is finally " out of the closet"!!!!! In a very anti-health position paper printed in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Dr. Santelli et.al. maintain that abstinence education is "scientifically and ethically problematic". Why? Because teaching children to abstain from sex until marriage is "inconsistent with commonly accepted notions of human rights". There it is--children cannot be taught to abstain from sex because it is their right to have sex. Damn the frivolous notions of teen pregnancy, STDs, AIDS, sexual coercion or abuse. Lets just make sure that the right to have sex is preserved without any limitation. That sure is worth the sacrifice of a few generations worldwide. I'm ready to give my children over to that lofty goal, aren't you?

Wake up America! It is scientifically and ethically okay to teach children not to use drugs, not to smoke, to eat healthy, to exercise, and to not drink or drive until a certain age but they cannot be told to protect themselves by not having sex until married despite the almost certainty that they will suffer a health consequence if they begin sexual activity as children. Where is the logic? That's right--logic comes in the form of a condom, a contraceptive or a vaccine. It surely is not the fault of any of these guardians of human rights that one in three sexually active girls gets pregnant and one in two get a disease. They taught children how to "have their cake and eat it too."--responsibility done.

The additional danger is, once we all accept the belief that sexual activity has no limits, no context, no connection with love, then the abuse that is already occuring, yet under-reported, in our communities flourishes. The issue becomes something other than the sexual behavior. Rape on campus is not a sexual assault, it is an alcoholic romp. A pregnant twelve year old just forgot her contraceptive or didn't discuss condom use with her 20-something "partner". Young newlyweds divorce in six months wondering how the sex could be so good before but the marriage be so bad.

So thanks to the Journal of Adolescent Health for showing its true colors. This is a magazine that has a very ideological bent to its medical opinions. Don't be so naive to think this is not affecting the great state of Wisconsin. The exact same argument was voiced by a Planned Parenthood representative at a public hearing last fall in testimony opposing the educational objective of abstinence as the expected behavior for school age children in the state. Although only nine state senators sided with that opinion, in the halls of the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Health and Family Services the exact same mentality is clothed in phraseolgy of "best choice", "respect for family values", and"parent-child connectedness". In actuality, these departments are trying to make schools and reproductive healthcare non-judgmental, value-free zones. From their Madison perch, the poobahs see no connection between their policies and the destruction occuring in the lives of our young people. Don't be fooled by the rhetoric that will continue to doom the undereducated, the poor, the at-risk and the children of broken homes to severe health and well-being consequences of sexual behavior that is publicly being condoned by not condemning it.