On Wednesday. the Executive Director of the Dominican Association for the Well-being of the Family (PROFAMILIA), Magaly Caram, raised a lot of eyebrows by calling on the Fernández Government to return full-fledged sex education in the nation’s schools. Caram cited a number of alarming statistics about teenage pregnancy in the DR (23% of girls age 15-19 were pregnant or mothers in the 1991-96 period, some 80,000 abortions are committed annually, most of them teens) to support her case that the lack of a formal sex education program in the DR is harming Dominican society. PROFAMILIA helped run a sex education program in DR schools for nine years (1983-92), but the program was canceled by the then-Education Minister Jacqueline Malagón, allegedly at the behest of Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez. Asked Thursday about PROFAMILIA’s call, current Education Minister Ligia Amada Melo angrily rejected it. She asserted that schools do teach sex education, albeit not in the fashion Caram would like. She accused Caram of really seeking to distribute condoms in public schools, which the Education Ministry could never agree to.
