Paraguay endorses abstinence-first sex education curriculum amid high teen pregnancy rates
Lessons in the Catholic country highlight traditional gender roles, with critics arguing it promotes harmful stereotypes and ignores LGBTQ issues
Paraguay’s new sex ed curriculum has sparked controversy and conservative jubilation. Photo: Shutterstock 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 tumour. Next thing Zalazar knew, a gynaecologist 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 realising it could make her pregnant.
Catholic Paraguay has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in South America. Many young mothers explained their teen pregnancies as the result of growing up in a country where parents avoid the birds and the bees talk. Meanwhile, national sex education is indistinguishable from a hygiene lesson.
Over the years that Zalazar, now 39, has gone from sexual ignorance and shame to raising her 23-year-old son and advocating for children’s rights. Paraguay’s lack of sex education however, has remained unchanged – until now. For the first time, the Ministry of Education has endorsed a national sex ed curriculum. But in a surprising twist, it’s the sexual health educators and feminists who are panicked. Conservative lobbyists are thrilled.
The curriculum promotes abstinence, explains sex as “God’s invention for married people,” warns about the inefficacy of condoms. It says nothing of sexual orientation or identity.
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“We have a very strong Judeo-Christian culture that still prevails, and there’s fierce resistance to anything that goes against our principles,” said Miguel Ortigoza, a key proponent of the curriculum. He is also an evangelical pastor from Capitol Ministries, a Washington-based non-profit organisation that ran Bible study for former President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Paraguay already has among the world’s strictest abortion laws – punishable by prison time even in cases of incest or rape, though not when the mother’s life is in danger.
Critics explain the outsized power of Paraguay’s right-wing pressure groups as the consequence of a peculiar history. The conservative Colorado party has ruled the country for 76 of the past 80 years – including during a dictatorship openly sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.
“Growing up under the dictatorship, I was told homosexuality is a deviation,” said Simón Cazal, founder of Paraguayan LGBTQ rights group SomosGay. “The dictatorship legally ended, but the same political clans kept running the show.”
In 2017, Paraguay became the first country to ban school discussions about gender identity. Now its sex ed curriculum has become a national flashpoint.
Education Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez downplayed the controversy, stressing there was still time to improve the curriculum before enforcing it. “There’s no expenditure of state funds,” he told lawmakers. “Let’s not pass judgment until we do deeper work.”
Authorities assembled teams to revise the curriculum, called “12 Sciences of Sexuality and Affectivity Education,” which it plans to pilot across five eastern regions before taking it nationwide. Parents’ rights groups praise the 12 books, one for each grade, as a way of teaching morals and protecting young people.
The curriculum instructs children to treat others with respect and cultivate healthy relationships.
But in discouraging contraception and enforcing traditional gender norms, it has become a lightning rod for social tensions. Critics say it perpetuates sexist stereotypes.
Masturbation, it says, causes “frustration and isolation.” Marital love lasts forever. Girls should beware of “how their way of dressing makes men behave.” Female puberty is “the body preparing to become a wife and mother.”
Any talk of sex is about the heterosexual variety.
At a workshop in August, participants voiced alarm over parts of the curriculum emphasising the duty of obedience to parents and authorities. It urged pregnant teens to confide in their families – even as sexual assault is typically perpetrated in the home.
“I never got help from my family, they were threatening me not to tell anyone,” said Liliana, who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant at 13. She spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because her case is under investigation.
As the politics of social conservatism surge from Brazil to Hungary, Paraguayan lawmakers have found immense promise in agitating against what they hold is a Western conspiracy to feminise boys and make girls gay.