LIKE so many other areas of critical discourse in our nation, the suggestion that condoms be distributed in school has put us in a moral, if not ethical and social bind.

Still, it’s good that we can discuss such a potentially explosive topic at all. We can still remember a time when it would have been taboo just to mention ‘condom’ and ‘school’ in the same sentence, and when ‘birth control was a plan to kill out Black people’.

We suspect that the suggestion to have condomdispensing machines in school might have come at the end of a long, fruitless night of trying to find solutions to end the scourge of teenage pregnancies that have so blighted the lives of too many of our students, many very promising ones among them.

And just as the debate began to heat up in February last year, the education minister, Mr Andrew Holness, gave an unequivocal ‘no’ to the suggestion, offering instead the revised health and family life education programme in secondary schools as the means through which students would be empowered to make healthy lifestyle decisions.

The prospect of putting condoms in schools is always going to be a difficult one. Even in the United States — wherein places like New York, a city mandate requires high schools to have health resource rooms, staffed by trained teachers, with condoms available to students for at least 10 periods a week — the for/against debate rages on.

It is worthy of note that Avert, an international AIDS charity, contends that studies into condom effectiveness have shown that if a latex condom is used correctly every time one has sex, this is highly effective in providing an 80% reduction in HIV incidence.

In addition, it noted that correct and consistent use of latex condoms can reduce the risk of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including chlamydia, genital herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis.

United Nations agencies such as UNAIDS, WHO and UNFPA also proffer the view that: “The male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.”

A survey of more than 4,000 adolescents attending Massachusetts high schools concluded that “making condoms available in high schools does not increase adolescent sexual activity, but it protects those who are already sexually active from some sexually transmitted diseases… a highly positive result,” according to Dr Susan M Blake of the Department of Prevention and Community Health at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, DC.

It appears to us that Jamaicans who shy away from the idea of condoms in schools do so not because they are not convinced about its efficacy against unwanted pregnancies and STIs, but because of the implied suggestion that it’s okay for students to be sexually active.

We agree that the suggestion is implied, even if not intended.

Furthermore, it would force teachers or other school staff who are against the idea for reasons including religion, to have to dispense condoms to students.

In the case of New York, for example, the city mandate calls for all teachers, starting with those who staff the socalled health resource rooms, to be trained to give condom demonstrations, and “must do so when students ask for condoms”.

We are not likely, in Jamaica, to get agreement soon, but let’s keep talking as a nation.