What we can learn from textsfromlastnight.com

The website textsfromlastnight.com says a lot about young people and demonstrates the necessity of family planning clinics and emergency contraception. Despite the fact that we discourage unsafe sex and binge drinking, people are still do these things anyway. Textsfromlastnight.com shows that young people are in fact using drugs, having sex, and often combining the two. And because they are, it is essential to keep providing family planning services and emergency contraception as a way to reduce the consequences of these actions. If you haven’t seen the site yet, it is a site dedicated to text messages from last night, last night being a crazy party or some other social function. People post text messages that they sent or received the night before, usually while they were intoxicated. Then other users comment on the posted texts and rate whether the sender of a text had a “bad night” or “good night”. A “bad night” vote might go for a text that says “I woke up with my head in the toilet” and a “good night” vote might go to a text that says “I don’t know where my underwear is.” Almost every text posted on the site has to do with drinking and almost every other text has to do with sex. And a lot have to do with both. These texts are proof that young people are binge drinking and sometimes having risky sex. Anyone who doesn’t support comprehensive sex education or emergency contraception obviously hasn’t seen this site yet because this site proves that as much as young people are warned against unsafe sex, some are still going to do it anyways, and because some are going to do it anyways there needs to be sexual health services that provide condoms, emergency contraception and STD testing before or after a “good “or “bad” night happens. Providing young people with sexual health services for before or after they engage in risky behaviors, like drunken sex, is a type of harm reduction. Harm reduction is a way of lessening the consequences of a high risk activity, like unprotected sex. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, which we can clearly see on textsfromlastnight.com, and it is important that we try to lessen the costs of some mistakes as much as we can. We can do this by encouraging safe sex and teaching how to be safe, but we can also do this by providing support and services, like easy access to family planning clinics that offer STD testing, condoms, and emergency contraception, to young people that might need them after they have done something that wasn’t so safe.