Quick Hits

In California and Oregon, recent legislation has made it possible for women to buy hormonal birth control at their local pharmacy without a prescription from their doctor.

The Join United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) recently released a report suggesting that the AIDS epidemic would be fully eradicated by the year 2030. According to Medical News Today, this new report shows, among other things, that between 2000 and 2014:

This past April, Alice Dreger—a Clinical Professor in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago—attended her son's sex ed class after hearing his accounts of the class and becoming concerned by its lessons on sexual abstinence.

A program in Colorado, in which teenagers and lower-income women were given access to free intrauterine devices and implants, has significantly lowered the rate of unwanted pregnancies across the state, giving young women a chance to establish themselves before starting families for which they were most likely unprepared.

In a recent story on Bustle, an online women's lifestyle publication, a spotlight was placed on It Matters, a new sex ed app launching in 2015. The application will allow users to access eay-to-understand information about sexual and reproductive health, and will also enable them to ask experts questions anonymously and locate nearby clinics.

This past May, a private school in Minneapolis received complaints from parents after its sexuality education class was taken on a field trip to the Smitten Kitten, a local sex toy store.

Up until this past June, schools in Hawaii were not required by law to teach sex education. And those schools that did provide sexuality education to its students relied primarily on abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula.

Three young teenagers who attend the Isaac Newton Academy in London recently won a prize at the TeenTech Awards for a concept they developed: condoms that not only prevent STIs, but also test for them. The media immediately exploded with news of these color-changing condoms that can detect STDs, but Martha Kempner points out in RH Reality Check that these condoms are but a concept... and should perhaps stay that way.

Earlier this month, feminist website Feministing spotlighted a female sexual health application called Screet, through which users can get on-demand delivery of products such as condoms, Plan B, personal lubricants, and more.

Several forms of male contraception are due onto the market in just a few years, reports The Telegraph. And unlike the options available to women, most of them won't include hormones. Vasalgel, for example,  a non-hormonal option administered via injection, was among the first to emerge into the public consciousness, and is due to come on the market sometime between 2018 and 2020.