Markus Junianto Sihaloho – The ruling Democratic Party has called for premarital sex counseling for young couples in a bid to stem infidelity and eventually achieve the UN-mandated Millennium Development Goals on eradicating poverty.
Democrat legislator Subagyo Partodiharjo, from the House of Representatives' Commission IX, which oversees health care, said on Friday that the idea was prompted by a party survey that showed only 1 percent of marriages in Indonesia lasted to the 50-year mark.
All the marriages that ended before reaching this milestone finished either in divorce or in the death of one or both of the partners, Subagyo said.
"The mortality rate in Indonesia is 79 per 10,000 citizens, which is very high compared to other countries in Southeast Asia," he said.
Other sources, however put the country's mortality rate at 63. The rate in Malaysia is 50 per 10,000 people, while in Singapore and Thailand it is 46 and 70 respectively.
Subagyo said the Democrats' survey also showed 40 percent of married Indonesian women were either unaware of what an orgasm was or had never experienced one.
About 200,000 were effectively forced into having sex by their husbands, while the large majority engaged in it reluctantly, thus accounting for the high divorce rate, Subagyo said.
"It's indicative of poor sexual awareness," he said. "The husbands don't like their wives' hostile approach to sex, and so they seek out prostitutes or mistresses, or marry a second or third wife.
"This results in families breaking up, which impacts negatively on the children and the family members' health," he added. "And so we get high rates of morbidity, mortality, maternal mortality and infant mortality. In short, the human development index in Indonesia is very low."
Subagyo warned that to make progress on the MDGs, the country must end its reluctance to provide sex education and set up a new body to offer couples premarital counseling on how to maintain healthy sex lives.
The Democrats' idea, he went on, involved setting up counseling offices inside existing community health centers and staffing them with a doctor and midwife.
"We're calling on the Health Ministry, the Religious Affairs Ministry and the BKKBN [National Population and Family Planning Agency] to consider the idea and hopefully begin implementing it," Subagyo said.
Rosmawati, the Democrats' adviser for health issues, said this new body would also help ease the social burden on married women without children.
In such families, she said, the husband almost always blamed the wife for being infertile, yet he himself was unwilling to undergo tests to gauge his fertility. "Studies show that in half of these cases, it's the husband who is infertile," she said.
Separately, Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) legislator Caroline Margret Natasa, also of House Commission IX, said her party approved of the idea of premarital sex counseling.
However, she said that setting up a new body to address the issue would be a waste of money. "It would be far better to use the health budget to first improve services for the poor, including providing health insurance for workers," she said.
Caroline added the counseling could be provided by existing institutions, such as the Catholic Church, which already offers a similar service for couples about to be married.