Last Summer, the
physician’s assistant that gave my 12 and 15 year-old boys their sport
physicals, surprised me by also giving a mini sex talk. I was somewhat
speechless at the time, but after collecting my thoughts, I wrote a letter.
Dear ________
Last summer,
you asked my 12-year-old son: “Do you know about sex?” Following his slow nod, you rapid-fired your
next question. “Do you know about condoms?” He was there for a sport physical.
I
interrupted: “We don’t teach our
children that it’s okay to have sex before marriage, and condoms have a failure
rate, so pregnancies still happen. Condoms don’t always prevent against STD’s
either.”
“Yeah, but
it’s better than nothing,” you replied.
And then you
moved onto another topic until the next patient came in: my 15 year-old
son. “Do you know about sex?” you asked
once again. I explained he had been at a
teen youth conference that summer and they talked about sex. That sufficed apparently to skip the condom
question.
Only moments
earlier, a nurse had asked if we wanted to our religious faith put into our records so as to be reflected in our medical care. My answer was yes. So, here is what the Catholic Church teaches and
what faithful Catholics follow.
1). Parents are the primary educators of
their children. Your desire
is to do the right thing but you and I don't agree on what that is. My husband
and I answer to God for the upbringing of our children. You do not have the right to usurp our authority.
2) Sex is more than the mechanics. When you ask kids if they know about sex, you
are merely asking them if they know how to
have sex. There’s more to the lesson. God
did not create us to use each other for pleasure. Sex is a gift for couples
committed in marriage in love, and willing to care for children that may
result.
3) Contraception doesn’t always work. According to the Guttmacher Institute’s Family Planning Perspectives report,
“Eighteen percent of couples who use condoms and 12 percent who take the Pill
become pregnant within two years." Most women seeking abortions do so
because of failed contraception.
A pack of condoms is no guarantee against
fatherhood or child support payments for the next 18 years, or that his first
child might be aborted.
4) When do you give the love and
responsibility talk? That
should go with sex, wouldn’t you agree?
5) The pill unleashed the sexual revolution
tsunami, but I’m hoping you aren’t prescribing it to your female teen patients. If you do,
please read the book Sweetening the Pill
by Holly Grigg-Spall. She is hostile
toward religion and has no problem with sex outside of marriage so that’s why I
suggest it to you—it is not just about my Catholic faith. As a health reporter and former user of the
pill, Holly wonders why feminists are turning a blind eye to reams of
scientific evidence on the destructiveness of hormonal contraception. Women are being destroyed emotionally,
mentally, and physically, some even suffer death and permanent disability,
because hormonal contraception is a type 1 carcinogen with lethal tendencies. If you prescribe something, you have a
responsibility to know what it does to your patients.
6) Give a kid a cookie, and he will eat it.
Give a teen contraception and…well, what do we expect? I know not all your patients agree with me,
but asking kids if they know about condoms is saying one thing: Have at
it. There is a better message. Don’t
scoff at the abstinence message and instead choose the harmful one just to fit
in with the world’s crumbling values.
7) Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical titled Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) was prophetic. (You can
read it here: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6humana.htm)
Or, you can read the new book On Human
Life http://www.ignatius.com/Products/OHL-P/on-human-life.aspx,
because it references many sociological studies that attest to the damage
contraception has done to society. It
includes Humanae Vitae and an historical account for what happened regarding
the Catholic reaction. I’d be happy to give you a copy if you are interested.
8) STD’s are skyrocketing, and condoms do
not protect 100%. In the interest of
full disclosure, teenagers (and twelve-year-olds) should know that sex +
contraception could = pregnancy or STD’s—some of which are incurable.
In a quote from Dr. Harold Jaffe, chief of epidemiology for the National
Centers for Disease Control, “Simply put, condoms fail. And condoms fail at a
rate unacceptable for me as a physician to endorse them as a strategy to be
promoted as meaningful AIDs protection.”
STD organisms are minuscule compared to sperm so they can slip through a
hole in a condom much more easily than sperm. The AIDS virus is so small that
two million of the disease-causing agents can fit on the period at the end of a
sentence. In 1993, the University of Texas found the results of 11 different
studies tracking AIDS prevention showed that the average condom failure rate
for preventing the AIDS virus was 31%. One reason is the many tiny intrinsic
holes in condoms that the virus can pass through. [Source: Dr. C. M. Roland,
editor of Rubber Chemistry and Technology]. And there is more than just AIDS. In the 1950s
there were only five STDs but today there are more than 50.
9) Get some good resources. There are many. Internationally acclaimed speaker, Pam Stenzel (http://www.pamstenzel.com) has resources
and travels around the world giving talks to teens in both private and public
schools. She worked for nine years as a pregnancy counselor in Chicago and Minneapolis
and had to tell hundreds of girls their pregnancy tests were positive. During an interview she once told me: “’You're pregnant,’ I would tell them. ‘There
is no easy way out of pregnancy. Abortion is painful, destructive, and
devastating. More than 80 percent of the women in our country who've had an
abortion say that if they could go back, they would have chosen something
different. And raising a child is not easy either.’”
10) Educating students as to the benefits of waiting is better health care
than recommending condoms. Perhaps many would commit or
recommit to abstinence if they knew of the Brigham Young University study that
found couples that waited until marriage to have sex had the highest percent of
happiness by 22 percent. “Regardless of religiosity, waiting helps the
relationship form better communication processes, and these help improve
long-term stability and relationship satisfaction,” study author Dean Busby, Ph.D.
stated.
Studies repeatedly show that sex outside of marriage is emotionally
destructive in the long run and has been linked to low self-esteem, later marital
dissatisfaction, and greater likelihood of divorce.
According to a study by the National Survey of Family Growth, premarital
sex increases the odds of divorce by about 60 percent. People who have
premarital sex run a greater risk of marrying someone who's not right for them.
Sexual intimacy can be emotionally blinding; clouding judgment and making
couples feel closer than they really are.
***
So buying a
condom for a night of fun is a bad idea at best and fatal at worst. But it’s
hard for kids to figure that out when adults in authority give them the
message: Go ahead and have sex, just buy a condom first. At least
give them full disclosure. Warning: Use of this product could ruin your mental
and physical health and lead to poverty, depression, failed marriages, and
death.
Please rethink your sport physical questions. An
Instagram version sex talk promotes the message that sex and condoms are a good
idea even for a 12-year-old. Do you really believe that?
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