according to a report on “Population and Development” from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, indian adolescents are having sex. often. without birth control.

wait–which indian kids are they talking about? surely not MY virginal cousins who’ve been shoved spitefully in my face for my entire life as paradigms of modest perfection. i kid. okay, i don’t. bitter! party of one!

my shock and scorn aside, i present most of the brief article below:

In the chapter on Adolescent Reproductive Health and Development, the report says: “Sexual relations among adolescents tend to start early, involve multiple partners and often are casual. They are also characterized by lack of contraception or condom use, and occasionally involve coercion and non-consensual experiences.”

The report further says that misconceptions aside, a large number of teenagers don’t even know the correct way of using a condom. “Young people between the ages of 10 and 25 years make up for 50 per cent of new HIV infections,” it concludes chillingly.

Only 59 per cent adolescents know about condoms and 49 per cent about contraceptive pills, the report says. “Instead of asking adolescents not to have sex, we have to give them information on how to protect themselves,” says Anjali Gopalan, director, Naz Foundation India. “Children are not stupid, they will protect themselves if they know how.”

and to think, vinod and i posted within minutes of each other…if young people in india are behaving this way, it’s quite possible that “India is already in first place”. sigh.