Marquette Sexual Health: What’s the Truth?
If the statistics incorrectly represent our sex culture, then what’s it really like?
To investigate, I did some research on our current resources. Here’s what I found:
The Marquette medical clinic offers testicular exams, gynecological exams, and the HPV and Hepatitis A/B vaccines.
There are over 20 varieties of STD’s/STI’s. Marquette Medical Clinic offers free testing for Gonorrhea and Chlamydia. Testing for Syphilis and HIV cost $15 and $20, respectively. Insurance cannot be billed.
There are 15 forms of contraception. At Marquette, you cannot receive 14 of these. The 15th type, Natural Family Planning, tracks a woman’s menstrual cycle to avoid or plan pregnancy. Information about Marquette’s method, which is designed for married couples, can be found on the internet.
According to Marquette’s Natural Family Planning, the stance on sexuality is as follows:
These are the facts. Based on this, I created and sent out a survey to see how Marquette students feel.
“I feel like Marquette does not care about my sexual health.”
Out of the 47 respondents, 37 are, or have been, sexually active during their time here. When asked to share their thoughts on the sexual health resources available to us as students, I detected a theme.
Most students feel angry, ignored, or simply want change. A minority group of respondents expressed satisfaction with Marquette in regard to sexual health. One respondent raised the following point:
“Marquette is a religiously affiliated university so they don’t have to do anything about supplying condoms or birth control.”
The above point embodies most of what I’ve seen as the argument against improving sexual health at Marquette. It’s not completely unfair. It deserves to be acknowledged. This begs the question: as a Catholic Institution, what can we do?
From what I’ve gathered, the majority of students are both sexually active and dissatisfied with the lack of sexual health resources at our institution, including STD/STI testing, contraception availability, information, and guidance.
The problem can’t be ignored. How do we move forward?
