Healthy Choices for Women
One of the first steps you can do to protect your health is to examine your sexual behavior.
Ask yourself this question: “Regardless of my age, are my sexual practices healthy, and do they put me at risk financially, legally, and health wise?” Women are very aware of these risk, but often face pressure from men to take them.
Now, just for a minute, despite your political ideology, party affiliation, values, and morals, who the publishers and critics of this campaign are, and your stance on abortion, consider the following idea:
For a single woman, the best protection from financial, legal, and health risks related to premarital sex is to simply not engage in it.
Now, this may sound counter cultural, silly, impossible, but consider that if you refrain from pre-marital sex, regardless of your age, you don't have to worry about the following:
- Condom Failure - your condom breaking, slipping, or failing. Did you know that condoms have an almost 15 percent failure rate in preventing pregnancy? This means that 15 out of 100 women will get pregnant in a year while depending on condoms to prevent pregnancy.
- HIV/AIDS - condoms can block transmission of HIV most but not all of the time.
- Other STDs - such as gonorrhea, Chlamydia, trichomoniasis, syphilis, cancroids, or genital warts (HPV). Condoms do not offer 100% protection against these diseases, and are less effective at preventing transmission of syphilis, cancroids, and clymydia - diseases which can be transmitted via sores (ulcers) on areas of the genitals not covered by a condom.
- Genital Herpes - You won't have to explain to a future partner about your genital herpes. Depending on the location of infection on a man, condoms may offer no protection against this disease.
- HPV or Hepatitis C - Both of these diseases are incurable - and they both can be fatal. You you may not even know you have either until you are diagnosed with cervical cancer or liver problems.(Note: it's uncertain if Hepatitis C is spread via sexual contact, but it is suspected.)
- Abortion - You don't have to worry about paying for an abortion, convincing your partner to pay for it, convincing a reluctant partner that you should have one (if you choose to inform them and include them on the decision), having a partner intimidate or try to guilt trip you into having one, having a partner begging you not to, and having to deal with the effects of having your baby killed through abortion. Think about it, who really wants to have an abortion?
- Paternity - You won't have to deal with your partner claiming the baby isn't his, take him to court, or even wonder which man is the father.
- Child Support - Just because you are awarded child support doesn't mean it's always paid on time. And if he's out of work, where does that leave you?
- Expensive Lawyers - You won't have to worry about hiring expensive lawyers to in order to take the father to court.
- Welfare / Public Assistance - Why have to bother with welfare if you don't have to? Why worry about WIC cheese? Why worry about welfare to work programs and rules?
- Your education - If you are in school, preserve your education and your future. Protect your health, future income, and career by not putting it at risk to begin with.
- Your Self Respect - You won't wake up to find out that you had on beer goggles the prior evening.
- Your Career - protect your future or current career by not putting them at risk.
- Day Care - you won't have to worry about picking up your child, dropping them off, or even finding day care if you don't take sexual risks.
Whether are are 12 or 65 year of age (or 45 for pregnancy related concerns), wouldn't it be nice to not have to worry about these things? You can, if you change your sexual behavior. You can have control over all of these areas if you change your behavior.
So when you are tempted to have a one night stand, have sex with your significant other, or when your girlfriends egg you on to "get some", simply remind yourself of the benefits of protecting yourself.
But how can you keep from or discontinue sexual involvement? By changing your behavior and dating habits. Click here for tips to avoid sexual involvement...