The Condom and Pill Make More People Ill

(1) Boston University, at the instigation of its president, John Silber, has assumed management responsibilities for the Chelsea School District. One thing the School District decided to do was to distribute condoms to high school students in order to save lives threatened by AIDS. Edwin J. Delattre, dean of BU's School of Education, gave a speech urging that the decision be reversed. In the course of his remarks he cited the following report from the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Dr. Theresa Crenshaw, a member of the national AIDS Commission and past president of American Association of Sex Education Counselors and Therapists told a Washington conference of having addressed an international meeting of 800 sexologists: ‘Most of them,' she said, ‘recommended condoms to their clients and students. I asked them if they had available the partner of their dreams, and knew that person carried the virus, would they have sex, depending on a condom for protection? No one raised their hand. After a long delay, one timid hand surfaced from the back of the room. I told them that it was irresponsible to give advice to others that they would not follow themselves. The point is, putting a mere balloon between a healthy body and a deadly disease is not safe.'“ Delattre comments: “I want all of our students in Chelsea to know what is at stake here—and, above all, what lies in their power alone, not ours, to accomplish decisively in the way of saving lives. I want them to know that betting your life—or letting someone else bet your life—on a condom is a gamble that only one in eight hundred experts on sexual behavior is willing to risk, and that if our own students behave otherwise, they make a mockery of their stated commitment, expressed over and over again in this room, to saving lives. And I want all the students who have taken it upon themselves to distribute condoms in Chelsea High School to know that this is the gamble they have invited their classmates to take—and this, in a community where health officials themselves express fear over current levels of AIDS in the population.”
(For a copy of the complete address, write Dean Delattre, School of Education, Boston University, 605 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215.)

(2) A medical trial published in the journal AIDS in 2009—monitoring HIV progression by the need for antiretroviral drugs (ART)—saw “the risk of becoming eligible for ART was almost 70% higher in women taking the pills and more than 50% higher in women using DMPA [Depo-Provera] than in women using IUDS.

The Condom and Pill Make More People Ill

The fact that more sex is now giv'n
Won't stop all the bugs that are driv'n
By all that are sure
There will be a cure;
More doctors should voice their misgiv'ns.

Misgivings 'bout condoms and pills
Give some in the world lots of chills
(1) Since th'alternative's full
Of a life without pull.
How else would they get all their thrills?

(2) Since they think there's enough
Of us people, our stuff.
What else cuts down breeding 'cept* kills?

*'cept = except