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Teenagers Push Their School To Really Support Safe Sex

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

High schoolers in Hanover, New Hampshire are pushing for a new policy that would make free condoms available in their nurse’s office, saying that it’s important to expand access to contraception among sexually active teens.

Members of Hanover High School’s student government are preparing to present recent research they conducted on teens’ access to condoms — including a survey of local parents that found more than 80 percent of them support providing free condoms in school — at an upcoming meeting of district officials. The students need their principal’s approval in order to move forward with the proposal.

“I think that’s all this motion is trying to accomplish, at least in my eyes, is to provide a safe means for students who do engage in sexual activity to do so,” Kelsey Smith, one of the students involved in the initiative, told local outlet WPTZ.

Smith’s efforts come on the heels of a similar campaign in Florida last month. There, students at Gainesville High School started a petition to get condoms into their own student health center, arguing it could help address their county’s particularly high rate of sexually transmitted infections. “It’s 2015, and condoms should not be an issue anymore,” the petition reads.

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As states slowly move away from the abstinence-only health classes that defined the 1990s, providing high schoolers with condoms is becoming more mainstream. Large public school districts in cities like Boston and New York have made free condoms available to students. Some schools in Philadelphia have even tried out condom vending machines in case students are too embarrassed to ask their nurse for the contraceptives.

Conservatives typically decry efforts to expand access to condoms. The right-wing Daily Caller, for instance, suggested the Florida high schooler who started the pro-condom petition could be the “next Sandra Fluke” — referring to the Georgetown law student who testified on behalf of Obamacare’s contraception mandate, and who has became somewhat of a symbol for the right’s distaste for subsidizing sexual health resources.

But passing out condoms in school is hardly controversial among medical experts. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a leading doctors’ group representing about 60,000 pediatricians across the country, officially endorsed the policy in 2013. Considering the fact that the U.S. still has the highest rate of sexually transmitted infections of any other country in the developed world, an epidemic that’s largely fueled by young people between the ages of 15 and 24, the AAP believes that expanding access to condoms is an effective way to keep teens safe.

There’s also compelling evidence that giving high schoolers access to contraception really works. New York City — where public schools have an aggressive program aimed at improving teens’ sexual health that involves handing out condoms, birth control pills, and Plan B — has seen its teen pregnancy rate plummet by 27 percent over the past decade. In Colorado, where a state program has given more teens access to long-acting forms of birth control like IUDs, the teen pregnancy rate has dropped by a staggering 40 percent over the past five years.

In addition to pushing for condoms, high schoolers have also increasingly protested for their right to comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed classes. Teens in Las Vegas recently rallied against their health classes, which they said were too conservative and didn’t adequately prepare them for the real world. Last summer, a Canadian teen convinced her school to drop a course on sexual purity after she filed a human rights complaint against it.