It’s virtually never that the town of Haines gets ahead of major, European nations on enlightened social policy, so this bears reporting: France made news this week in announcing free condoms for citizens aged 18 to 25.
Haines has offered free condoms for more than 25 years – to anyone.
There’s a grab-box of complimentary rubbers mounted on the outside of the Haines Public Health office in Main Street’s Gateway Building. Anyone can take a handful of them any time of day. And they do.
I know because I walk past the office on my way to work and condom variety is always changing.
Friends tell me that Judy Mosher, a public health nurse who worked here in the 1990s, put up the box deliberately on the outside of the office so young people wouldn’t have to experience the embarrassment of asking for them.
A scene in the classic film “Summer of ‘42” is illustrative.
It portrays teen-ager Hermie braving a trip to his small-town drug store to buy condoms 80 years ago. The druggist, who knew the boy and was curious what he was up to, asked him if he knew what condoms were for. “Sure,” Hermie says, playing dumb. “You fill them with water and drop them off the roof.”
Getting condoms in Haines previous to Mosher was nearly as awkward. The only ones in town were locked in a glass cabinet behind the checkout counter at Howsers. To get some protection on a weekend, a person would literally have to signal a cashier that they were expecting some sex. In a town the size of Haines, it was embarrassing and demeaning, even for adults.
Mosher changed all that, apparently without a word of controversy or protest, and we’re better for it. The pregnancy rate of teenage girls in this town is down significantly from the 1970s and 1980s, and maybe Mosher deserves some of the credit.
I recently asked a woman friend who has spent a career at the school why teen pregnancy is no longer so common and she didn’t know. Maybe it’s the result of a generation of sex education in our schools. Maybe it’s the morning-after pill. Maybe young people today are having less sex.
Short of spending money on an academic study, we’ll probably never know, but we can be glad for it and proud of this bit of social advancement.
A college friend of mine grew up in tiny Gregory, South Dakota in the 1970s. He told me that 6 of 7 girls in his high school senior class were pregnant before graduation and despite the dismal numbers, the school board kept voting down sex education.
His enduring fantasy was to load his pickup truck up with condoms and dump them at the top of the school’s stairs.
But preventing pregnancies isn’t the motivation of French president Emmanuel Macron. It’s stemming sexually transmitted diseases.
France is seeing a spike in STDs, including a 30 percent increase in 2020 and 2021. The numbers are also up in the United States where syphilis infections climbed 26 percent in 2021.
A sign on the condoms bin at the public health office reads, “Alaska’s STD rates are some of the highest in the country.”
A recent article in Forbes magazine notes that while condoms and testing are available without charge in some parts of the U.S., “for most people, these items will not be freely available.”
So go ahead and get your free condoms and wrap that rascal. And remember Judy Mosher, a publicly spirited public health nurse who took a small action and likely saved our town from a whole lot of pain and heartache.