Largest Nation in North AMerica is currently suffering through high pregnancy rate among teenage girls and continuously increasing numbers of HIV cases. The government is worried about how to
abstinence early age pregnancy. The major reason of HIV cases and pregnant is to have sex without taking contraceptive measures. Brazil’s government has a message for teenagers at a time when their country is dealing with a very high pregnancy rate among teenagers and more and more HIV infections: wait to get married for sex.
Minister for Women ,Family and hUman Rights told that the major reason of sexual relations is the social pressure.“In general, our young people have sexual relations due to social pressures,”.They can go to a party and have a lot of fun without having sex.”
Damares has clarified that he worked closely with the team responsible for the “I chose to wait” campaign, conceived by evangelical pastors with a large number of followers on social networks, to formulate their policy. This decision prompted a hot debate about reproductive rights and sex education in the largest nation in Latin America.
His critics affirm that the government’s new emphasis on abstinence makes the division between Church and State blurred, as well as causing young people to have little information to make decisions related to their sexual life and that these are harmful to their health.
“We have twenty years of public health studies worldwide that show not only that abstinence policies are not effective, but that they have terrible consequences for teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” said Debora Diniz, Brazilian law professor and reproductive rights activist. “We talk about designing public policies based on religious beliefs.”
The emphasis that the government has placed on abstinence is consistent with a 2018 presidential campaign in which sex and sexuality were the dominant theme.
President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies accused his left rivals of encouraging teenagers to have sex at an early age. Bolsonaro also condemned a school campaign against homophobia designed by his leftist predecessors, although it was never launched. He said the campaign was a “homosexual kit” whose purpose was to “pervert” the students.
His message was very effective in mobilizing evangelical voters, a growing group with great political power in Brazil.
The person responsible for the campaign to promote abstinence promoted by the government is Alves, an evangelical pastor who defines herself as “extremely Christian” and who is one of the most visible and popular members of the Bolsonaro cabinet.
Some experts believe that the campaign could undermine the progress that Brazil has made in reducing teenage pregnancies.
The rate of teenage pregnancies in the country, which reached its highest point in the 1990s, when it reached around eighty out of every thousand births, has shown the same global downward trend in recent decades, but remains very high , in about 62 of every thousand births, well above the global average of 44 per thousand, according to a United Nations report published last year. The rate in the United States was 18 per thousand in 2017.
Another health problem that requires urgent attention and could be affected by the campaign is the fight against HIV infection. Brazil obtained global recognition for its unconventional actions to combat the disease at the beginning of this century, and even ignored global patents to manufacture generic versions of life-saving medicines. However, for some years the virus has spread at a rate that experts rate as alarming.
In 2018, 43,941 new cases were reported, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, an increase of 41 percent over the number of cases registered in 2014.
Alves, who did not respond to our request for an interview, defended his ministry’s abstinence campaign in a recent essay published in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, and emphasized that the intention is not to replace existing initiatives, including access to contraceptives and condoms, but complement them.
“We work with all ministries to offer additional material at every step that people make decisions,” he wrote, adding that the government does not intend to “impose, but inform, which reinforces autonomy.”
Alves has given few details about the budget and scope of the abstinence campaign, whose launch is scheduled for next month. In defense of this approach, Alves explained that abstinence campaigns in the United States have proven effective.
Leslie Kantor, a professor at the Faculty of Public Health at Rutgers University and one of the leading experts in teenage pregnancies, said the minister’s statement is false and can be easily demonstrated based on the findings of ten