Essay About Virginity In The Philippines

Virginity in the Philippine Context In the Philippines, the youth population has an estimated median age of 22.9 years in 2010. About 19.8 million Filipino youths aged 15-24 were noted in the same year. This number comprised about twenty-one percent (21%) of the total population of 95.8 million Filipinos. Nearly half of these young people are adolescents aged 15-19 years (National Youth Commission, 2010). Developmentally, young Filipino men and women consider the time of the first manifestation of changes in their bodies as the start of the adolescence. The onset of menstruation and increase in breast size were perceived by his women-respondents as the initial physical changes (Acaba, 2006). These changes normally occur at age twelve although others show these signs at an earlier age of nine or ten years (Serquina-Ramiro, 2011). Studies show that teen pregnancies in the Philippines are on the rise and have increased as much as seventy percent almost three

The only Christian country in Asia seems to disregard the preservation of virginity until marriage. This comes down to the country’s sexual health conditions. Sexual health is thought to be either titillating or prurient like the half-naked bodies plastered on highway billboards or clinical like the brochures that show genitals eaten up by sexually-transmitted infections (Acaba, 2006).

It’s as if sexual health is to be regarded as two words, which are mutually exclusive: sexual or health. But sexual health is not two words. When put together, sexual health is one word referring to how you would take care of any other part of your body. And until we are able to think of sexual health in this light, we leave out the young girls who are vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies. We leave out the men who would like to be part of, and take equal responsibility for, the bodies, and life decisions of their partners. And we leave out every person’s equal right to choice (Santos, A.,