Freshmen magazine 1 | Page 15

What it would look like without my problem

Imagine a place where adults and teenagers talk about the risks besides pregnancy but instead of an infection or disease that you can be in contact with when being sexually active.. Imagine a teenage girl maybe around 16 or 17 she says that she’s always safe when being sexually active saying she’s talking the pill and sometimes uses a condom. Yes the pill can prevent you from a pregnancy, but not from a STD or STI the only things that can prevent you from getting an STD or STI is a condom and getting tested but she didn’t know that. Of course she doesn’t know her school never taught her about that topic, they always said to be abstinence which is the best choice and of course her parents didn’t talk to her about this topic either. Well it's too late for this girl she has been in contact with the STI chlamydia. She didn’t know until she talked to someone and went to get tested. This could have been prevented if teenagers talked about this topic and so did their parents. Abstinence isn’t the only way to prevent an STD or STI it's an option that some take but not all do. If teenagers start protecting themselves for STIs the the number of infections would go down. Last year, nearly 2.3 million US cases of these sexually transmitted diseases were diagnosed, according to preliminary data. That's the highest number ever reported nationwide, breaking the record set in 2016 by more than 200,000 cases, according to the CDC

Reflection

Something that I learned about this topic is that it’s a bigger problem than I had anticipated. It’s also a very complex problem when it involves teens because there's no real fault in just one person, it falls onto everyone. In a way it can be the girls/boys fault or the parents maybe the partner or even the school. I have also learned that it’s very easy to find information about this topic but there aren’t many programs that come to schools to inform us about this topic. Something that I came across is that if I want to make a difference that will really benefit us is by getting parents educated about this topic and the students as well to help bring an awareness. Another thing that was really hard was getting stakeholders because not many get in contact or they reason with information that their websites have. I am considering keeping this topic for the next year and maybe making a club where we talk about this topic and say our opinions on this topic.

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