Last week I wrote about the benefits of sex education for boys. For girls, sex education has even greater benefits which are in my opinion so important that even old-fashioned societies should no longer ignore them. Women are taught to feel ashamed about their sexual organs and everything related to them. Contraception, conceiving, giving birth and everything around those topics, including their own health, is nothing one should be talking of. If this attitude could change, if these women could all regularly go to gynecologists and have check-ups done, how many cases of cervical cancer could be prevented? How many other diseases could be diagnosed, treated and healed? Ultimately, how many lives could be saved?
I don’t want this point to be underestimated. Young people these days also have sex, often before their marriage but without any kind of sexual education and of course hidden from their parents and surrounding. What do you think they do when they discover they have any kind of sexually transmitted disease, probably received because they were not taught properly about the use of contraceptives and protective measurements? They have nowhere to turn!
In the same way, what do girls do, when they discover an unwanted pregnancy? In their despair they go to some chemist, in a town where nobody knows them and ask for abortion pills or some kind of medication so that they can get rid of the life growing in them. I have seen advertisement in newspapers for ‘Mensurole’, a pill that will ‘start your interrupted menstruation’. They will not say clear that it will intervene in the development of the fetus, because that would be illegal, but that is what it means. You don’t need any prescription, just take it, on your own risk. Other young women, especially when the pregnancy is already further advanced, go to ‘doctors’, charlatans with no license and have an abortion made there, often with the most primitive instruments, in unhygienic situations and far away from their family so that nobody may know what they are doing. It is risky and many have died in an attempt to save their honour or that of their family.
If they had been educated, they may not have faced this kind of situation. In the west, too, all these situations have been there, people have seen and heard of those stories but through sex education and a more open relation to one’s sexuality, those cases are now rare. People learned and they taught their children. There it is unimaginable that you get pills for abortion through a newspaper advertisement and without a doctor’s prescription.
You can save your children from guilt, shame, disease and abortions if you have a more modern, open view on sexuality and sex education. Your daughter will know her body, feel good about it and will know how to take care of it. This much for today. Tomorrow I will write more about the moral aspects, also in countries like India.
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So sad to think of girls in such situations. But you are right, this has happened in Europe, too, and I believe in America, where the health care system is not yet very good, more women face such problems still, because they cannot afford a normal hospital and doctor. There it is a problem of money, not of shame.
When a person feels ashamed, you can control her.
The female abuse is a big bundle of many aspects of ignorance.
I talked to a psychiatrist, who is working as a sexual therapist in Southern Delhi and she said that so many child wifes come to her to ask about menstruation, since they never have had it, because frequent pregnancies. And the women don’t have sanitary napkins, use some rags they can get and are ashamed every time they have their period. 90% of them are suffering from different kind of gynegological problems.
They never heard about the pill (even though they would be able to get it for free!), or AIDS and they never have seen a condom.
She pointed out, that female empowerment has a lot to do with breaking the taboos and the shame around the female body.
It is really sad that there is this kind of situation even in a city like Delhi, where you can get information everywhere and where you would think people are more educated.So interesting to hear those stories from you and to how many people you have already talked!
It is so important to make people aware of these topics (for example the pill) and help them to loose this shame!
It’s so important for young women to know that sex is a part of life, that their sexuality is not evil. Women grow up with so much shame. It affects the world in vast and subtle ways. I saw this beautiful TedxSF talk by a woman who works with female sexuality. It was deeply inspiring:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9QVq0EM6g4
Women are given a huge burden in life- the responsibility of life production. Even though men are involved, it is not their body that becomes pregnant and has a human life grow inside it. Men can easily detach from their actions and act impulsively. Women have to be strong and empowered. We have to be responsible and mature because we hold the key to life within our bodies. We should honor our women and treat them like the jewels they are. Give them respect for the crucial and challenging role they must play in life.