In 2004 teen comedy classic Mean Girls, the fictional American high school students are told by their eminently unqualified sex education teacher Coach Carr simply to “not have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.” Away from the silver screen, in 2020, Brazil’s Human Rights Ministry appears to have taken a leaf from the Hollywood screenplay and has launched a campaign promising to have the solution to combat teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases: kids, just don’t have sex.
The cabinet ministry is using the advent of the National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Week—a newly instated commemoration to take place every year at the beginning of February—to promote a nationwide marketing campaign on the “benefits” of sexual abstinence. The idea is that abstinence is the most effective method of contraception, encouraging young people to delay their forays into sexual activity and thus avoid all possibility of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection.
The ministry’s plan is to develop a series of public policies on the matter of abstinence and produce educational textbooks to be used in schools. Tests will begin in the poor Northeast and North regions of the country, choosing three cities to serve as pilot projects in the so-called National Plan to Prevent Early Sexual Initiation. The propaganda to be disclosed by the program bears the slogans “Adolescence First, Pregnancy Later,” and “There’s a time for everything.”
The program is the latest brainchild of Brazil’s Minister of Women, Family, and Human Rights, lawyer and Evangelical preacher Damares Alves. Since she was nominated for the...
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