- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
Ahead of her 15th birthday, Diana Zalazar’s body had gotten so big she could no longer squeeze into the dress she bought for her quinceañera to celebrate her passage into womanhood in Paraguay.
Her mother sought help from a doctor, who suspected that growing inside of the 14-year-old Catholic choir girl could be a giant tumor. Next thing Zalazar knew, a gynecologist was wiping down the probe she’d applied to her belly and informing her that she was in her sixth month of pregnancy.
It made no sense to Zalazar, who had recently had sex for the first time without realizing it could make her pregnant.
In Catholic Paraguay, which has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in South America, many young mothers explained their teen pregnancies to The Associated Press as the result of growing up in a country where parents avoid the birds and the bees talk at all costs and national sex education is indistinguishable from a hygiene lesson.
“I didn’t decide to become a mother,” Zalazar said. “I didn’t have a chance to choose because I didn’t have the knowledge.”
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As an ex-Catholic, I would like to say, fuck the Catholic church. For this bullshit and their many other crimes, moral failings and abuse.
Joke’s on Diana — kids getting knocked up is exactly what the church wants.
Sounds like a factory that produces mentally ill people
Yes have you not heard of Catholicism before?
You think that’s something you need to visit the south.
Jesus is coming to take them away on his spaceship just before he nukes the jews, atheists, catholics, and all other non-Christians any day now.
Not just the non-Christians, the wrong Christians as well.
I don’t think ignorance is a mental illness
I went to an all-boys Catholic highschool. I had a teacher that was a Christian Brother. One day he had an argument with a classmate over how effective condoms were. He basically argued that condoms don’t work. (Even arguing that a Ziploc bag couldn’t keep semen from escaping.)
This teacher was pretty popular because he was a character, who’d sometimes make crude jokes.
After graduating, some friends and a I ran into him at a mall. He asked us “What are you guys up to? Picking up little girls?”
We laughed it off thinking he was still his same old jovial self.
Not long after, I heard that this same teacher had been arrested for being involved with minors. His “joke” that day seemed like some major projection.
even for crude humor that’s just gross.
I grew up with religious parents. Looking back, they restricted me from doing things, even innocuous, without explicitly stating we to why. But I know that it’s because they are afraid I “might get ideas”. Fortunately, I have been to good schools and got taught about basic sex education. Ironically, my parents sending me to good school taught me better than being “taught” by my parents who don’t want me to “get bad ideas”.
I wonder how she thought she’d get pregnant.
For many religious groups it’s common for teens and even young adults to not have a clue where babies come from. The biological urge to have sex is still there. So teens experiment around and figure it out but often don’t understand the consequences.
Teens are going to have sex whether you teach them anything about or not. Comprehensive sex ed reduces teen birthrates and STD transmission. It also delays the age when they initiate sex.
You’d think knowledge of where babies come from would be the worst kept secret ever, but here we are.
I understand, but it’s the “It made no sense to Zalazar”, which seem to imply that she thought she knew how she could get pregnant.
Maybe she was taught the “when mommy and daddy really love each other” way of getting pregnant.
I learned abstinence only bullshit in school. Many pregnant teenagers in high school
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