Playing with Fire 
When we talk about safe sex we’re usually talking about encouraging teenagers and college students to use condoms to prevent disease and pregnancy. There are two assumptions involved here: they’re going to do it anyway, and using the condoms will protect them. Both assumptions are false, and today I’m going to tackle that last one.
When I was a teenager, the most common STD’s were gonorrhea and syphilis, both of which were curable with penicillin. STD’s have since multiplied, and now they’re more likely to be viruses with no effective treatment.
Not only are they immune to treatment, they may also be immune to condoms. Most alarmingly, condoms don’t prevent HPV, a disease that about 50% of sexually active young women now carry. This one, in particular, ain’t pretty: once you have it, you have it for life, even if you’re asymptomatic. It’s the leading cause of cervical cancer, the serious kind that can prove fatal even to young women, and once a teenager has had sex with three or more men, she’s already five times more likely to get it. Chlamydia, against which condoms do seem to work, is nevertheless also rising in incidence. It’s been estimated that around 25% of university students test positive for chlamydia antibodies, a disease that can cause infertility in both men and women. The consequences of teen sex, it seems, last far beyond graduation.
Sometimes they last a lifetime. Condoms, if used properly, should prevent pregnancy. That doesn’t mean they do, however, and several family members who will bless my Christmas table this year are living testimonies that one should not place one’s faith in condoms. They didn’t even work especially well for yours truly, though that may be too much information.
There’s no doubt that being pregnant as a teenager can be devastating, whether one has the baby or one aborts. It affects one physically and emotionally, and it interferes with schooling, with relationships, with friendships, and with dreams. Many teen moms overcome these obstacles and raise their children wonderfully, but just because one can rise above circumstances doesn’t mean that we should stop steering our kids away from them.
A friend, who is also a family doctor, recently counselled a 16-year-old girl after a pregnancy scare. He asked about her sexual history, and she revealed that she had had three partners in a year and a half. In all cases, she had dated the boys for several months before any sexual activity took place, so she was hardly promiscuous by today’s standards. He asked her at what age she would like to get married. "Around 27," she replied. "How many partners do you expect your future husband to have slept with?". "Just a couple," she said. Then he did the math with her. Assuming she keeps up with her current rate of activity, she’s looking at 20 partners by the time she marries. If those partners, and her future husband, have been similarly active, that’s a lot of potential diseases.
The safe sex message, then, isn’t quite so safe. Why not, instead, teach about the risks of sexual activity with an abstinence message? That’s how we teach about drugs. We certainly don’t say: "you shouldn’t do drugs, but we know you will anyway, so here’s how you find a clean needle, and here’s how you find a vein". We tell them "just say no". With sex, we abandon these kids to make a huge decision with lifelong consequences when they’re still too young to marry, to drive, to vote, to drink, or even to drop out of school.
The common argument against this, of course, is that "teens are going to do it anyway, so let’s protect them as much as possible." Next week I’ll tackle that line of reasoning. Yet for now, I think it’s time for us parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and educators to take a look at what’s really going on. We need to teach our kids a new model of behaviour to protect them from heartache, pain, illness, and even death. After all, isn’t that what being a parent is all about?
You can find more columns on raising teens in Reality Check, the book.
