‘Parents must educate kids about sex’
ZAMBOANGA CITY: A Commission on Population ( PopCom) Region 9 official appealed to all Zamboanga Peninsula parents to serve as their school children’s main source of vital information about sex.
PopCom Assistant Regional Director Ralph Ruivivar traced “the increasing incidence of teenage or unwanted pregnancies and wrong notions about sexuality to unaddressed needs for accurate information about the problem.”
Ruivivar said, more often than not, “teenage girls and boys receive information about sex from their peers who apparently have inaccurate versions on the activity themselves.”
When teenage female students get pregnant, they get frightened and ultimately become young mothers who usually resort to abortion or abandonment of the infant, the PopCom executive added.
The National Demographic and Health Survey revealed “one-half of the Filipina population are of reproductive age and majority of this number are young girls not a few of them enrolled in secondary schools or in early college.”
Similarly, the Young Adult Fertility Survey indicated ”one-third of teenage girls and boys are already sexually active who did not use any form of contraception during their first sexual intercourse.”
The PopCom official expressed strong concern over the statistics “and pushed for full implementation of the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), starting in the intermediate grades where pupils are already aged 15 and 16 until they enter junior high school at age 17 up to their culmination of senior HS (High School) at age 18.”
Ruivivar said “many sectors are against the CSE, but its instructions are age appropriate… and very helpful to properly educate school children about sex and to avoid the consequences of wrong sexual information.”
He said during the recent World Population Month, “government advocates accentuated the significance of reproductive health and informed choices of family planning to avert overpopulation.”
According to Ruivivar, the Philippine population is currently estimated at about 108 million, now considered the 13th most densely inhabited country in the world.