IN parts of Nepal, teenage girls who are menstruating are banished from their homes to live in primitive huts with poor sanitation and ventilation and no access to clean water, in the belief that they are unclean when they have their periods.
Last month, at least two girls died in poorly heated “menstruation huts” far from their communities, one from inhaling smoke from the fire that kept her warm.
Police say 10 girls have died in similar huts over the last nine years, most from smoke inhalation, snake bites and lack of basic health care during menstruation.
The practice, called chhaupadi, is a centuries-old tradition that was outlawed in 2005, but persists today, particularly in the country’s far west.
Aside from being isolated in tiny menstruation huts, women and girls are forbidden during their periods from touching other people, cattle, green vegetables and plants, and fruits. They are also not allowed to drink milk or eat milk products in the belief that this could anger a god or goddess and cause livestock to die or crops to fail.
Here, most of us would condemn and scoff at such primitive beliefs, thinking ourselves to be a modern, progressive, and rational society where science, not superstition rules our lives.
Yet we continue to allow ourselves to be swayed by the superstitious notion that it is somehow evil to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted teenage pregnancies.
Reacting to the administration’s plan to distribute condoms in public schools as a way to stop the spread of the HIV virus that causes AIDS, the Couples for Christ Foundation for Family and Life (CFCFFL) last week said the program was an even “greater threat” than the rise in extra-judicial killings and the looming revival of the death penalty.
In a message to anti-birth control advocates on the feast of the Holy Innocents, the group cautioned that “acceptance of condoms—seeming to the general public as unharmful—is actually the start of the slippery slope to the whole gamut of the culture of death.”
The group then makes the leap, unsupported by facts or logic, of linking condom use to the legalization of abortion—ignoring the fact that the use of condoms would actually make abortions unnecessary.
The use of condoms would also certainly reduce the risk of HIV or AIDS among the young (ages 15 to 24), who account for 24 percent of the 38,114 cases reported since 1984.
But none of this matters to the CFCFFL or Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, who warned Health Secretary Paulyn Jean Rosell Ubial that he will block her confirmation if she pushes through with the condom distribution plan.
He said the Health department was taking the “wrong approach” and said the agency should instead go on an information campaign focused on moral values.
Senator Sotto’s prescription is so harmful to our society’s progress that perhaps it is he who ought to be sent off to an isolated hut somewhere to keep him from spreading ignorance and arrogance, traits so deadly when taken together that even the gods would be angered.