Condoms for Everyone!

In a policy statement that will surprise no one who has ever paid attention to teenagers, sex, or facts, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Adolescence has said that making condoms available to teens is a good idea.

[The AAP committee] said schools are a good place to make condoms available. To be most effective, they should also be accompanied by sex education programs.

There is still some resistance to making condoms more accessible for young people, researchers said.

"I think one of the main issues is the idea that if you provide condoms and make them accessible, kids will be more likely to have sex. But really, that's not the case," Amy Bleakley said. "Getting over the perception that giving condoms out will make kids have sex is a real barrier for parents and school administrators," she told Reuters Health.

...She said some studies suggest teenagers with access to condoms and comprehensive sex education actually start having sex later than their peers who don't.

...The new policy statement, an update to the AAP's 2001 statement on condom use by adolescents, was published Monday in Pediatrics.

"The biggest difference is that we have more evidence about how effective they are against sexually transmitted infections," Dr. Rebecca O'Brien, the policy statement's lead author, said. That's especially true for viruses like herpes and HIV, she added.

...In its recommendations, the committee said doctors should support consistent and correct use of condoms. They should also encourage parents to discuss condom use and prevention of STIs with their adolescent children.

Sexually active teenagers should have access to free or low-cost condoms, such as in pediatricians' offices and schools, the committee emphasized. At retail stores, condoms sold in multi-packs typically cost 25 to 50 cents each.

"For teens to use them, they have to have them available, and they're not going to come in necessarily asking for them," O'Brien said.

O'Brien specializes in adolescent medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. She said her office has a fishbowl full of condoms.

"Having them available, not just in healthcare settings is really important," she told Reuters Health. "Have them in the mall. They should be everywhere."

It should basically be raining condoms anywhere there is a concentration of teenagers.

This idea that making contraceptives available to teenagers will encourage, enable, tacitly permit them to have sex is absurd and tiresome. That's not the way humans work, at any age. The availability of condoms will not make a huge difference in the number of kids having sex; it will only make a difference in how many kids have safer sex.