Hanoi (AFP)

In two years, Huong suffered two voluntary abortions. Lack of free speech in homes and lack of education on the pill or condoms, many Vietnamese still consider abortion as a form of contraception.

"I was terrified when I found out that I was pregnant (...) I think if we had been told about protected sex, we would not have fallen into this trap," said the young AFP. woman, now 20 years old.

Huong, a pseudonym to protect her identity, was 16 when she learned that she was expecting a child. She turns to an older friend who directs her to a private clinic where she has an operation.

"It really hurt me." Afterwards, "I felt (...) a great insecurity and a great emptiness", she says.

She became pregnant two years later. Better informed, she then resorts to the abortion pill.

Her case is not isolated in a country where the abortion rate has long been one of the highest in the world.

Vietnam has a young population and sexual behavior has changed dramatically in recent years, with earlier intercourse and later marriage.

The proliferation of dating apps, better distribution of condoms and birth control pills have also moved some lines.

But at home or at school, sex remains a subject "in a way prohibited", notes Linh Hoang, 23, part of a crusade to change the mentalities of the communist country.

Protected sex is not addressed and society "has no idea what sex education is or how to teach it," added the young woman who founded in Hanoi with three friends WeGrow Edu, a start -up to talk to young people about sexuality.

Launched eighteen months ago, the small business sells boxes containing sanitary napkins, pregnancy tests and condoms with guides to use them. The team also goes out to meet students in some twenty schools in the capital.

- birth control -

For decades, Vietnam has imposed a policy limiting the number of children to two per family, but due to lack of education and family planning, this has led to an explosion in voluntary abortions.

In 2005, there were 37 per 100 births, according to data from the Ministry of Health.

The birth control policy has since been abandoned and the abortion rate fell to 12 per 100 births in 2019, compared to 29 per cent in France in 2018.

But the Vietnamese figure is largely underestimated according to experts who explain that many abortions are performed in private clinics and are therefore not counted.

Legal up to 22 weeks and easily accessible in these establishments, this practice remains used frequently, and not only as a last resort, according to them.

There is always a "worrying trend" which consists in "considering abortion as contraception", confirms Nguyen Van Cong, a young doctor who founded the education program "We are grown up" ("We are adults" ).

Masturbation, consent, sexually transmitted diseases: his team, which has already met thousands of students, discusses all subjects.

With the coronavirus pandemic, Linh Hoang had to stop the meetings, but she continues to give her advice through the boxes she sells.

When they receive them, "even my friends confess that this is the first time they have touched a condom," she notes. And this is still the case "for the majority of people".

© 2020 AFP