The New York Times broke an alarming story this morning.
According to a new government study, one in four U.S. teenage women have at least one sexually transmitted disease. And those numbers are alarmingly double for African-Americans. Nearly half of the African-American teenage girls in the study had an STD.
The diseases the Feds monitored in the study included human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes simplex type 2 and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.
The two most comon diseases? HPV at 19 percent and chlamydia at 4 percent.
The study included more than 800 women, ages 14 to 19, who agreed to be tested for STDs.
This news makes me wonder — how can parents keep arguing that the HPV vaccine will promote premarital sex and promiscuous behavior? At 25 percent (which is a significant number) it seems that we’re already beyond that point.
And those are just the girls that have diseases — not the ones who have had sex and never contracted a disease.
Finally, my biggest concern about this story: where’s the study about boys? While women have achieved equality across many fronts since the Feminist movement, there’s one we still haven’t conquered. Medical institutions and the media, for decades, have perpetuated this idea that women are the only gender to be held socially responsible for sexual health – not men, who as I see it, play an equally important role.
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