THIS IS JUST TOO SCARY.



MANILA (AFP) - As many as 30 percent of couples in the Philippines are unaware that having sex can result in babies, Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit said.

"They do not know how pregnancy happens," even though some of them have had numerous children already, Dayrit remarked.

The discovery was the result of field studies by health workers who went door-to-door to determine population control program awareness, Dayrit said in remarks released here.

He did not say how many couples in the mainly Roman Catholic nation were surveyed.

The field workers found that in many of these cases, the couples believed the children were simply gifts from God.

"Often times people do things even if they dont understand why they do it," Dayrit said, attributing the ignorance over sex to the conservatism of Philippine society.

"A lot of it is cultural because people dont talk about sex," he said, remarking that "knowledge is often tempered by values. And if the values are such that they will reject knowledge theres nothing you can do," he added.

The government is promoting a door-to-door campaign for population control in this country of 84 million people but the Catholic church, which counts about 80 percent of the population as followers, has been actively opposing the campaign.