Why Education Is Better Than Cure

Posted by Joanna Karpasea-Jones Apr 23, 2007

My sex education consisted of a blushing mother, faulteringly telling me about periods and the very basic functions of sex. She didn't tell me about my reproductive anatomy, say anything about sexual health or contraception and when I asked her about pregnancy and childbirth, her only response was 'it doesn't hurt'.

Years later, when I was 15, the school decided it might be a good idea to have sex education classes. These involved a lecture on periods, having to draw a diagram of the vagina and penis, being told about sex and condoms, and having to watch some frightful 1960's video of a woman giving birth, surrounded by men in green masks.

By this stage I had already been having periods for 3 years and suffered a vulval disease called vulvodynia for that same length of time. Nowhere in the diagrams we were asked to draw, was an accurate description of the female genitalia. I am ashamed to say I got to the age of about 28 before I even knew where my vulva was or what a labia was, and I was the mother of 4 by then! Most girls, if you ask them, just call the whole thing 'vagina' when that is the internal canal only, and they have no idea what their other parts are called.

The only health issue that was discussed in school was HIV/AIDS. There was no lecture on other diseases and no discussion on how these diseases and how having multiple partners can actually risk a person's fertility.

In fact, fertility wasn't even mentioned. How many teenagers do you think may choose to wait for a life partner or at least use a condom if they were made aware that sleeping around could prevent them from becoming parents in the future? If they were given accurate information about their bodies and how they work from an early age, it would not only enable them to report any problems to a health provider, but also foster a greater level of respect for themselves and those they date.

In the climate of increasing infertility and reproductive disease, where 1 in 6 people need assistance to have a baby, teenagers need separate classes on infertility, as well as the standard 'how not to get pregnant at 14' classes. If they were told that putting off a family to pursue a career until you're 35 might mean you can't have children, well, they could store this information for their future and this might reduce the number of couples going through the heartbreak and trauma of childlessness.

If we as a society treated the human genitals with less taboo, then the next generation of parents would probably have less STI's and girls would know what to look for if something went wrong with their reproductive system.