The Humble Condom's News Page

Well, I think we should be grateful for the fact that the conversaion has begun, but is this new?
According to the newly released State of World Population 2009 report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a slowing of population growth could help ease the impacts of climate change.
Free contraception and family planning services are emphasized as necessary in the report, specifically in some of the world's least developed countries. The report reads: "Women with access to reproductive health services...have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."
UNFPA estimates that world population will increase from 6.7 billion people in 2009, to 9.2 billion people by 2050. The majority of this growth is predicted to occur in developing countries where condoms are not utilized to the extent they could be, and where many women remain in the dark about family planning and their own sexual rights.
UNFPA's Richard Kollodge, editor of the report, told MediaGlobal that the recent headlines concerning "fighting climate change with condoms" have "nothing to do with what's in the report. Our report is about empowering women and offers no simplistic solutions to a problem as complex as climate change."
The focus of the report is on increased access to contraception and family planning services, specifically in developing countries, something UNFPA has advocated for years.
"About 175 countries agreed in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development that 'all countries should take steps to meet the family planning needs of their populations as soon as possible and should, in all cases by the year 2015, seek to provide universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family-planning methods,'" Kollodge noted. "UNFPA supports this objective, partly by funding contraceptives."
Last year alone, according to Kollodge, "UNFPA spent about US$89 million on all forms of contraceptives, such as the pill, injectables, female condoms, and male condoms. Increasing access to voluntary family planning is an important part of UNFPA's ongoing work in 158 countries."
While international donor funding for such services has fallen "from US$723 million in 1995 to US$338 million in 2007," Kollodge reported that "there are an estimated 200 million women worldwide who would use family planning services if such services were available to them. The unmet demand for family planning therefore remains high."
This being the case, "The State of World Population 2009 calls on donors to fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies within the framework of reproductive health and rights," Kollodge said. "The decision to practice family planning must be completely voluntary and not according to the wishes of a service provider. Family planning services should be client-centered."
The report describes links between population and climate as "intricate" due to the "many, many factors that must be taken into consideration in any aspect of climate change," Kollodge explained. "For example, the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is not only about the number of people on the planet. It is about what we consume, the types of energy we produce and use, whether we live in a city or on a farm, whether we live in a rich country or poor country, whether we are young or old, what we eat, and even the extent to which women and men enjoy equal rights and opportunities."
The influence climate change is having and may have on people, according to Kollodge and UNFPA, is also "complex, spurring migration, destroying livelihoods, disrupting economies, undermining development, and exacerbating inequities between the sexes."
Though the report concedes that people contribute to climate change, Kollodge reminded, "the report also says that not all people or countries are created equal when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. So far, the industrialized countries have generated the lion's share of greenhouse gases, but have been relatively immune to climate change. The industrialized countries created most of the problem, but the world's poor are already facing the biggest problems adapting to it."



WIFE AIDS FEAR;
No condoms as he bedded porn stars

SECTION: NEWS; 1

LENGTH: 64 words

SHAMED Tiger Woods
Enhanced Coverage Linking
Tiger Woods  -Search using:
Biographies Plus News
News, Most Recent 60 Days
was at the centre of a new storm last night over claims he had unprotected sex with porn stars and a string of party girls.
Health campaigners blasted the randy golf ace for putting his wife Elin at risk of HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases.
Several of his alleged lovers - including GBP 5-an-hour cocktail waitress Mindy Lawton - claim he never wore condoms.




hould be grateful that the conversation has begun, but is this really NEW?

A few weeks ago, I was carpooling with a group of people I do some volunteer work with.  All nice people, all about 60, and all, coindicentally, single, one mentioned he'd found the link to this web page on an email I'd sent.  His voice was all disgust and shock...the woman sitting next to him knew I'd written the Humble C and she too made it sound distasteful.  Then the conversation between the two turned to the shocking use of the internet to share pornographic images. 
I was tempted to tell them - perhaps lecture them? - on the fact that they were now the new at-risk generation, especially given their newly single status.  I refrained, but it was proof that the same old prejudices are out there, even amongst the supposedly enlightened. 
Ignorance is not always bliss.

A trip to the dentist:

A dentist noticed that his next patient, a little old lady, was very
nervous, so he decided to tell her a little joke as he put on his
gloves.


'Do you know how they make these gloves?' he asked.


'No, I don't,' she replied.


'Well,' he spoofed, 'there's a building in Canada with a big tank of
latex, and workers of all hand sizes walk up to the tank,
dip their hands in, let them dry, then peel off the gloves
and throw them into boxes of the right size'


She didn't even crack a smile!



'Oh, well. I tried' he thought.



Five minutes later,
during a delicate portion of the procedure,
she burst out laughing!


'What's so funny?' he asked.


'I was just envisioning how condoms are made!'

An editorial from The Guardian (London)

July 28, 2009 Tuesday

All of us are in denial. Without it we couldn't get through life. Were we to confront the implications of mortality, were we to comprehend all we have done to the world and its people, we wouldn't get out of bed. To engage comprehensively with reality is to succumb to despair. Without denial there is no hope.

But some people make a doctrine of it. American conservatism could be described as a movement of denialogues, people whose ideology is based on disavowing physical realities. This applies to their views on evolution, climate change, foreign affairs and fiscal policy. The Vietnam war would have been won, were it not for the pinko chickens at home. Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida. Everyone has an equal chance of becoming CEO. Universal healthcare is a communist plot. Segregation wasn't that bad. As one of George Bush's aides said: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Collective denial has consequences. A new study by the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) shows that during the latter years of the Bush presidency, America's steady progress in reducing teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases was shoved into reverse.

Between 1990 and 2004, the birth rate among teenage girls fell sharply: by 46% for 15- to 17-year-olds. The decline was unbroken throughout these years. (The same thing happened in the rest of the western world, though about 20 years earlier). But between 2005 and 2006, something odd happened: the teen birth rate increased by 3%. In 2007 it rose by another 1%. I think most people would agree that this is a tragedy. According to the UN agency Unicef, women who are born poor are twice as likely to stay that way if they have children as teenagers. They are more likely to remain unemployed, to suffer from depression and to become alcoholics or drug addicts (all references are on my website). Similarly, the incidence of gonorrhoea dropped for more than 20 years, then started to rise in 2004. After a long period of decline, syphilis among teenage boys began to increase in 2002; among girls in 2004.

The CDC makes no attempt to explain these findings, but the report contains four possible clues. The first is that between 1991 and 2007, the percentage of high school students who had ever had sex declined. So did the number of their sexual partners, and their level of sexual activity. But from 2005 onwards there was a levelling or reversal of all these trends. The second possible clue is that while the use of condoms among high school students rose steadily from 1991 to 2003, it stagnated then declined between 2003 and 2007. Towards the end of the Bush years, schoolchildren began abandoning condoms at the same time as their sexual activity rose.

The third clue is provided by the shocking data from the Hispanic community. Adolescent Hispanic girls have less sex than their non-Hispanic classmates; but they have three times as many children as non-Hispanic white teenagers. Why? Because they are less likely to use contraceptives, probably because of the doctrines of the Catholic church.

But perhaps the most interesting clue is this one. The CDC has published a map of trends in the teenage birth rate. I ran it against a political map of the Union and found this: nine of the 10 states with the highest increase in teenage births voted Republican in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. (Eight of them voted for McCain in 2008.) Among them are the Christian conservative heartlands of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma. These are the places in which Bush's abstinence campaigns were most enthusiastically promoted.

Bush did not invent sex education without the sex. Clinton's last budget set aside $80m for abstinence teaching. But by 2005 Bush had raised this to $170m, and engineered a new standard of mendacity and manipulation. A congressional report in 2004 explained that programmes receiving this money were "not allowed to teach their participants any methods to reduce the risk of pregnancy other than abstaining until marriage. They are allowed to mention contraceptives only to describe their failure rates." The report found that over 80% of the teaching materials "contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health". They suggested, for example, that condoms do nothing to prevent the spread of STDs, that 41% of sexually active girls and 50% of homosexual boys are infected by HIV, and - marvellously - that touching another person's genitals "can result in pregnancy".

While "abstinence-plus" campaigns (teaching contraception while advising against sex) are effective, a long series of scientific papers shows that abstinence-only schooling is worse than useless. A paper published in the British Medical Journal found that abstinence programmes "were associated with an increase in the number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants". An article in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that although teenagers who have taken a pledge of abstinence are less likely to have sex before marriage, and then have fewer sexual partners, they have the same overall rate of infection as the kids who haven't promised anything. This is because the pledgers are less likely to use condoms, take advice or go to the clinic when they pick something up. Most teenagers (88%) who have taken the pledge end up breaking it. But, like the campaigners, they are in denial: they deny that they are having sex, then deny that they have caught the pox.

A study published by the American Journal of Public Health found that 86% of the decline in adolescent pregnancies in the US between 1991 and 2003 was caused by better use of contraceptives. Reduced sexual activity caused the remainder, but this "ironically . . . appears to have preceded recent intensive efforts on the part of the US government to promote abstinence-only policies". Since those intensive efforts began, sexual activity has increased.

Unicef, when it compared teenage pregnancy rates in different parts of the world, found that the Netherlands had the rich world's lowest incidence - of five births per 1,000 girls - and the US had the highest: 53 per 1,000. Unicef explained that the Dutch had "more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception". There was no "shame or embarrassment" about asking for help. In the US, however, "contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a 'closed' atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy".

Barack Obama's new budget aims to change all this, by investing in "evidence-based" education programmes. The conservatives have gone ballistic: evidence is the enemy. They still insist that American children should be deprived of sex education, lied to about contraception and maintained in a state of medieval ignorance. If their own children end up with syphilis or unwanted babies, that, it seems, is a price they will pay for preserving their beliefs. The denialogues are now loudly insisting that STDs and pregnancies have risen because Bush's programme didn't go far enough. The further it went, the worse these problems got.

The Toronto Sun