DISTURBING: Chemical castration to prevent teen pregnancy

yurbud

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Thu Aug-03-06 02:37 PM
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DISTURBING: Chemical castration to prevent teen pregnancy

August 1, 2006

Reducing Teen Pregnancy to Zero

Graham Bessler, Pharm. D.

In seventh grade, Martha Davis was the star center of her soccer team, student body president, and an honor student with a 3.6 GPA. In eighth grade, she is the mother of twins, stays home to care for her children, and will be lucky to finish her GED online and get a job at Dairy Queen. Teen pregnancy is affecting even the best and brightest of today�s young people, slowing their education at the very time we are shifting to an information economy, and increasing their financial burdens just as real wages are declining. Past solutions have been an abysmal failure.

The decades long sex education including birth control effort has had mixed results. The total teen birth rate is down, but the number of girls having children out of wedlock is staying roughly the same and sometimes increasing. Interviews with teens show the reasons: while they understand how birth control works, they use it primarily to prevent disease rather than pregnancy. A boy may use a condom with a partner with a bad reputation or obvious open sores, but as relationships progress, the condom is used less and less as concern over disease fades. The only upside of this is girls are less likely to get pregnant by males they had only a brief relationship with.

The more recent �abstinence only� approach has had even worse results. Abstinence only includes like or no information about contraception and instead relies on chastity pledges and attempts to convince teens that promiscuous sex cheapens intimacy and will make it harder to be faithful to a partner when they marry. The Texas Department of Health found these programs actually increased teen pregnancy. This is likely for the exact same reason teen pregnancy occurred in their grandparents generation. Since teens do not consciously plan to have sex, they don�t take condoms with them on dates, so if they do have sex, they can say �It just happened.� And it just happens at about the same rate as it does with their peers who have sex education including birth control, but without even the haphazard use of condoms, pregnancy occurs more often.

Since neither of these has proven 100 percent effective, we should turn to what has been a far more reliable solution for other problems like attention deficit disorder, depression, and irritable bowel syndrome: pharmacology. Depo Provera could be administered to teens to dramatically decrease teen pregnancy rates to near zero. As a birth control method for females, it requires an injection once every three months, and has a failure rate of only 0.03 percent. The shots could be administered by school nurses on a regular schedule.

A second use of Depo Provera would not only eliminate teen pregnancy, but teen sex itself. Depo Provera has successfully been used to reduce the sex drive of child molesters and rapists, who are often given a choice of the treatment as a condition of parole. Without male sex drive, there will be no teen sex.

An obstacle to implementing this is likely male reluctance to undergo the treatment since sex occupies 97 percent of the thoughts of teenage boys. Therefore, alternative methods of administering it may have to be developed such as mixing it in the foods boys often choose in the cafeteria like cheeseburgers and milkshakes. Another approach would be to put it in the drinking water in schools. In that case, administrators may want to alert teachers to bring water from home.

Universal Depo Provera therapy for teen males would have a number of positive side effects, nearly all related to the drug reducing aggression and hostility. Students who are less hostile will behave better in class and focus more on their studies than fantasizing about classmates, passing notes, and playing footsy. It will reduce fights in the halls, freeing teachers to spend more time helping students with their schoolwork and less time acting as policemen.

Reduced teen male aggression will benefit broader society as well. Teen males engage in any number of high risk activities like reckless driving, binge drinking, and re-enacting episodes of Jackass. The decline in speeding and reckless driving alone could save thousands of lives and millions of dollars.

Some side effects must be noted. Fatigue, depression, weight gain, and development of feminine physical and personality traits have been reported both among prisoners given this therapy and at the high school pilot project in Fresno. Many boys exhibit smoother skin, stop growing facial hair, and develop breasts and broader hips. In Fresno, far fewer boys have gone out for football, but on the positive side, their interest in handicrafts such as making friendship bracelets, hair-braiding, and henna has grown exponentially. The principal of the high school has said he has encouraged the football coaching staff to seek retraining to meet this new and growing demand.

While the effects and side effects go away once the therapy is stopped, psychiatrists have expressed concern that by suppressing sexual impulses during the teen years, boys will fail to develop the social skills necessary for courtship and marriage, and may result in a life of involuntary celibacy for those who have undergone the treatment even though their sex drive has been restored.

We must weigh these risks against the benefit of reducing teen pregnancy, but this approach promises to be far more effective than those tried in the past.