The issue of sex education has been the center of controversy for several months in Panama, where every year the number of teenage pregnancies grows, as well as sexually transmitted diseases.
The Planning and Evaluation Manager of the Panamanian Association for Family Planning (Aplafa), Yuri Pittí, expressed her position on the preparation of the five didactic guides of the Education in Sexuality and Affectivity program to be implemented with primary school students. , premedia, media, pregnant adolescents and parents of families or guardians, indicating that Aplafa never participated in the work tables and received the material on the day they were launched, and then they began to study them.
“We (Aplafa) have a position that, unfortunately, this is not the first initiative of a government in turn to execute programs or projects within the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Health on reproductive sexual education. The problem with this type of initiative is that it remains an initiative of the government of the day ”, he stated.
He considered that while Panama does not legislate on the issue of sexual and reproductive education, and does not have legislation that regulates where in the curriculum these elements are incorporated, who is in charge, who is going to be trained to protect this education to children and young people, “one on the one hand is left to the will of the government in power whether or not to implement these programs and projects.”
Pittí declared that “we continue to invest in programs that, probably in five years or less, these guides will be shelved, they will not be used and they will say they will be discarded, and it is a human resource, an economic resource that is lost, but even more the opportunity is lost. to reduce the numbers that we are just talking about, and there are children and adolescents seeing their lives impacted because they are not receiving accurate information ”.
He recalled that there are important laws in the country such as the 1999 law on equal opportunities, law 29 of 2002 on pregnant adolescents, among others.
According to the Planning manager of Aplafa, it is violent that every time the government changes, speeches and initiatives are changed, and responsibilities are not assumed.
