Hot Flashes

Why should you wait four times a year for us to grind out a newsletter, with some news that is 4 months old by then, when weekly you can get the hottest news about the Bush administration’s attacks on family planning services, or the latest research on adolescent sexuality or a story about a 40something professional mother of 2 who, through her counseling sessions at PPABC, decided not to terminate her unplanned pregnancy and raves publicly about our very professional, non-judgmental staff. There is a lot to tell you and boy the best would be if we started ongoing conversations (those of us who have lots of opinions might now have an audience to listen!)

Remember when we all worried about President Clinton because he said he “didn’t have sex with that woman”? What he did, he said, didn’t really count as sex. Remember that we were nervous American youth would replicate this hair split, and protect their virginity by engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors other than intercourse? We were sure that the definitions of what “sex” is or was would change and, worse was the fact that plenty of sexually transmitted infections would rear their nasty heads anyway.

Nonetheless, I have hot-off-the press news for you. The Guttmacher Institute who studies sex, especially teen sex ( now there’s a way to make a living!), has published a study that shows that the majority of teens who have oral sex do so after they have been having intercourse the usual way.

(I assume you know what I mean).

Now this may seem like trivia and almost more information than a self respecting adult and/or parent wants to know. But the health care implications are huge. We need to know where teens face risks and 81% having oral sex is worth noting (and this study is just about heterosexual sex). Counseling and education must take into account the full range of behaviors that teens engage in. We may worry about them, wish they’d be more careful, wish they would think things through, but nonetheless the PP job is not to judge, but to teach and expose the risk while acknowledging that, like us, they deserve to have healthy, age-appropriate fun.

We have to broach this topic with kids, some as young as 15 (or even younger). We have to engage with them in ways that help them be painfully honest and open up to us. 1 in 4 American girls has a sexually transmitted disease and 81% of sexually active kids indulge in oral sex, so we’ll be in business for a while? And thanks be to our staff, who know the magic ways to reach youth with just the right blend of caution and respect…not easy when kids are doing crazy stuff.