Every year, millions of people around the world mark December 1st with remembrances and marches, all with the best of intentions, to remember World HIV/AIDS Day. Also with the best of intentions, we hear world leaders and activists speak in ubiquitous platitudes about the fight against HIV/AIDS, both the disease and the stigma, and how we will win.
This year was no different, except that I started seeing headlines saying that 'X person' believes being HIV/AIDS free is a generation away. And I started to get truly uneasy about it. Sure, medical and scientific advances are moving along at a relatively fast clip, but how can people say we will be a generation away when we can't get current generations to understand the least simple ideas of sex education?
On Friday, ThinkProgress.org released a story about Mississippi's governor Phil Bryant arguing that teens don't care about birth control; well, Phil, you and the evangelical community reap what you sow. Mississippi experiences the highest rate of teen pregnancy, and I would bet my last dollar that the state's rate of STIs among teens is also not something to brag about.
What's the link between wiping out AIDS in a generation and teen pregnancy in Mississippi? Simply this: we will never overcome the spread of HIV/AIDS as long as people remain woefully uneducated or criminally misled about Birth Control. When you are taught that condoms *increase* the spread of HIV, so you'd better just be abstinent, you are not going to seek out birth control. And that, folks, will lead not only to more babies having babies, but more STIs and HIV getting around. It's going to take a generational overhaul from top to bottom, all generations alive today, to meet this idea that AIDS will be beaten in a generation.
The fight needs to continue.
Proper Sex Education...
...Wish you were here.
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