Distribution of Condoms to Students
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The Los Angeles Unified School District has the right to make condoms available to students as a means of preventing the further spread of HIV/AIDS. They have a constitutional right to do this, they have the right granted by the favorable attitude of the great majority of adults, and they have the right to act to prevent students from perpetuating a serious, deadly public health crisis. Many of those who are opposed to the program argue that it encourages students to have sex or that it grants approval to their behavior. It is true that premature sexual activity among adolescents is a serious social problem. But any responsible person would take both problems into account -- the social problem and the health problem. A responsible condom distribution program would ensure that students received comprehensive education about the dangers and causes of HIV/AIDS as well as being taught that abstinence is the best means of avoiding the disease and is a preferable choice for many other reasons. A responsible person would not, however, ignore the fact that millions of teenagers ignore all these warnings and are both sexually active and, in many cases, do not even use condoms when they are available. The courts ruled in New York, when the New York City schools began distributing condoms to students, that the program was not unconstitutional. Some opponents of the plan had claimed that by distributing the condoms, the schools were bypassing parents' rights to have a say in wha
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so makes up one third of all new cases of HIV infection (Shelton 1995).
Because of the nature of the disease, when people are not aware of being infected and do not take precautions this number is likely to rise exponentially unless teenagers are aware of the problem and willing to take steps to avoid it. But, aside from the fact that so many teens do not even believe they might become infected, there are other reasons why the number of cases among adolescents in particular will probably continue to rise. Guttmacher et al. point out that this rise is inevitable in view of certain facts including the enormous number of sexually active adolescents, the fact that "most HIV-positive teens do not know their serostatus", and the startling fact that "the vast majority of sexually active teens do not use condoms" (1995, p. 101).
Shelton notes that, as of one year ago, there were only about 100 school-based clinics in the country that distribute condoms (1995). So far there is little evidence of the effectiveness of the programs in preventing disease. The large numbers of teens who do not use condoms may signify that educational efforts are failing. Even schools that do not have condom distribution programs very often have fairly
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1855
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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