Dallas Country commissioners voted Tuesday to allow local county health departments to distribute free condoms in high-risk neighborhoods, repealing a mid-90s ban that had prohibited the practice. The debate was another showdown between abstinence-only versus preventative-measure public policy towards sex education and STD prevention.
When the condom-distribution ban was enacted, the county decided to push a pro-abstinence only platform. The results were less than promising, highlighted in 2006-07 when Dallas County had the highest rate of HIV infection in Texas.
The county health department, the county medical director and the Dallas County Medical Society – in other words, the people who know what they are talking about – all supported re-enacting the condom-distribution policy.
Pfft. But what do these “medical directors” know about upholding the upstanding moral fiber of our population? Detractors to the policy claimed that free condoms at health clinics would encourage kids to engage in deviant sexual behavior – even gayness! One such council member proposed a compromise: give condoms only to those who are already infected, have had sex with infected people, or who have had sex with a prostitute – no condoms to the uninfected looking for safe sex. Huh?
The moralistic side has one undeniable argument: abstaining from sex is the most reliable way to avoid any STD. But the other side of the argument is just as irrefutable: there is going to be a large part of the population, religious or not, that chooses to engage in sex. With those two mutual truths against one another, there are two options: a) we singularly plan on people not having sex and conversely don’t provide safeguards for those who do or b) we hope people will abstain from sex and take measures to limit the consequences from those who don’t. One option puts all our eggs in one basket; the other option provides public safeguards.
I would be more willing to listen to the “abstinence only” argument if it wasn’t a blatant way to inject religious morality into public health. But it is.
Kudos to the council for (finally) reversing this ill-advised ban.
