N.Y. to Give Out a Million Free
The city will distribute at least 1 million free condoms a year in an aggressive public anti-AIDS campaign designed to make every New Yorker a “condom expert,” the city health commissioner said today.
“The latex condom is currently our most effective front-line weapon against increases in sexually transmitted diseases and especially the relentless epidemic of AIDS--which is surely our city’s most urgent health problem,” Commissioner Stephen Joseph said.
“Everyone needs to be a condom expert, or condom-comfortable.”
Assistant Health Commissioner Stephen Schultz said that “if abstinence is not possible, then use a condom. Asking people to abstain from sex is tantamount to asking people to stop eating.”
Joseph said he expects opposition to the condom campaign.
“Some people fear that advocating condom use will encourage promiscuity and promote homosexuality and what some might judge to be inappropriate birth control,” he said.
But the program has been set up to be “careful, tasteful and concerned with the moral and ethical dimensions of what we are doing.”
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