the Taiwan Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology released a report on Sept. 23 saying that 16 percent of first-year university students have had sexual relations and that 10 percent of them did not use contraception on their first sexual encounter.
This is not the first report of teenagers having sexual intercourse. The Health Promotion Administration, for example, has conducted surveys to show the percentage of 15 to 19-year-old girls with sexual experience; the results being 6.7, 10.4 and 12.7 percent for 1995, 2000 and 2007 respectively. Over the past decade the number has increased almost twofold.
The release of the report came ahead of the World Contraception Day on Sept. 26, the objective of which is to increase awareness of contraception and to improve sex education and reproductive health. The event is promoted by scientific and medical groups, and 12 international non-governmental organizations in 70 countries.
Japanese government health statistics show that in 2005, 50 percent of 17-year-old Japanese girls had had sex, compared with 40 percent of males. US figures for 2013 showed that 47 percent of senior-high school students had had sex, compared with 54 percent in 1991. According to statistics, the percentage of US teenagers having sex has gradually been falling since 1988 and, with the increasing use of contraceptive methods in the US since the 1990s, pregnancy and birth rates among teenage girls in the nation has fallen, too.
In New York, for example, where the pregnancy rate among 19-year-old women has consistently been higher than the US national average, the rate dropped by 27 percent for students in state senior-high schools from 2001 to 2010. The statistic is attributable to the city government’s policy of integrating sex education with family planning measures. The result was the percentage of students having had sex fell from 51 percent to 39 percent, and from 2009 to 2011 the use of the contraceptive pill or other forms of contraception rose from 17 percent to 27 percent.
US courts have already ruled that girls, irrespective of age, needing Plan B emergency contraception — known as the morning-after pill — can buy it directly from drugstores without a doctor’s prescription.
However, In Taiwan, the birth control pill is a prescription drug and doctors would give a wide range of answers if they were asked what they thought about whether they should be able to prescribe the birth control pill or the morning-after pill, to junior-high, senior-high or even teenaged university students without informing their parents.
This year, the Ministry of Health and Welfare issued a directive requiring doctors to report as sexual assaults any pregnancies in girls under the age of 16. Should doctors also report girls in this group asking for contraceptive pills as victims of sexual assaults-in-waiting?
There are an estimated 150,000 unplanned pregnancies in Taiwan every year, with more than half of the women deciding to keep their babies, while about 46 percent have an abortion. More than 70,000 of these unwanted pregnancies happen while one of the pair was using a form of contraception. Avoiding pregnancy is not a simple matter of one minus one equals zero.
The majority of the women who have unplanned pregnancies are young, unmarried women, or have low incomes. For the association to respond to World Contraception Day with a report focusing on university students alone is really not seeing the big picture and amounts to little more than an entertainment piece by a lazy journalist.
In 2009, China began to take part in promotional events to mark World Contraception Day. This year it participated by handing out thousands of free contraceptive pills in Chongqing City in Sichuan Province. Chinese people over 18 years of age can have access to free family planning measures simply by showing their IDs. In Beijing they concentrated more on reproductive health among teenagers in an attempt to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, with students from 19 universities providing information about contraception, abortion and AIDS.
During a press conference, the association said that issues such as miscalculating the infertile “safe period” for having sexual intercourse, misusing condoms and contraceptive pills, and abusing the morning-after pill were too technical, and were not effective ways to address the problem.
The public should question why the National Health Insurance system covers maternity checks and childbirth, but does not cover inexpensive methods such as contraceptive devices and pills, sterilization or abortion.
When statistics tell that students in Taiwan are being careful, but that the percentage of those with sexual experience is increasing year by year, Taiwanese should be looking to the West and what they are doing about contraception and sex education, because the evidence shows that Taiwan’s policy on contraception and sex education are the main reasons that Taiwan fell so badly behind on World Contraception Day.
Chiang Sheng is an attending physician in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mackay Memorial Hospital.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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