Brazil Under Bolsonaro Has Message for Teenagers: Save Sex for Marriage

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Laryssa Pereira de Souza, 15, who had a baby last year, said the abstinence message could conceivably resonate with evangelical teens, but she predicted it would be dismissed by most adolescents.

Laryssa, raised in a conservative evangelical family in Rio de Janeiro, struggled to tally all her classmates who had children.

“Almost all my friends at school got pregnant,” she said while bouncing her 7-month-old son, Arthur Bernardo, on her lap. Like many girls her age, Laryssa took advantage of home schooling programs that allow teenage mothers to stay enrolled in classes.

“Here, things are very liberal,” she said. “What we need is better access to pills and those things,” she added, referring to birth control.

Ms. Alves has provided few details about the budget and scope of the abstinence campaign, which is to be rolled out next month. In defending the approach, Ms. Alves said abstinence campaigns in the United States have been effective.

Leslie Kantor, a professor at the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, and a leading expert on teen pregnancy, said the minister’s claim is demonstrably untrue based on the findings of dozens of studies on the issue, which has been the subject of a fierce political fight in the United States since the 1980s.

Sex education programs that emphasized abstinence, Dr. Kantor said, have tended to exclude information pertinent to gay and bisexual people and provided misleading information about the efficacy of condoms and contraceptives. She said the idea of limiting, or delaying, sex education might seem politically expedient, but is ultimately a bad idea.

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