Letters to the Editor
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"Wanted..."
It goes without saying (so why say it?) that the "right-to life" crowd would grab this rock and call it a gem.
Any clearly thinking person can point out that lack of available reproductive counseling is the culprit here.
A lack of antibiotics,leading to an increase of infection,does not mean that people are supporting a disease state.
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Parallel studies needed
I hope that someone's doing a parallel study, which would be the number of women injured or killed by back-alley, illegal abortions and whether this number is increasing or decreasing. And another study of the number of children in foster care due to abuse and neglect by the parents that never wanted them in the first place.
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Babies having babies
The article indicated that there was a great increase among teenage girls - this is only going to get worse with abstinence-only "health" education infiltrating many high schools.
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bending the topic a little, but...
Re: abstinence-only sex-ed and an increase in the teen pregnancy rate.
How long has ANY type of sex-ed been going on in the schools? I admit I'm a very small sample here, but I don't remember there being anything said officially in school that "you shouldn't do it till you're married" or whatever OR about the different forms of birth control. I'm 25, attended Catholic grade school and public junior high and high school in small-town Indiana. About as conservative and red-state as you can get.
They did teach us the basic plumbing in grade school--about menstruation and wet dreams and how babies are made, but as it was a Catholic school and we were 10-12, I think everyone knew it was pretty much a given that you were expected to be abstinent and nobody expected to be told about how to use a condom or whatnot. I don't know what the public school kids got.
In junior high, everyone had to take two semesters of health--which was sex-segregated because it was opposite P.E. and because of scheduling involving the use of the gym. I don't remember a thing being said about anything involving sex--it was all about heart rates and digestive tracts and stuff like that.
In high school, we took a co-ed semester of P.E. and the college-track kids took a year or two of bio. Nothing about it there--I think by that point it was assumed we knew what was going on.
I knew about the different types of birth control, their benefits and drawbacks, by the time I was eleven. Did my own research. This was before the internet, and it really wasn't that hard to find.
We did have a lot of obvious teen pregnancy in the school, esp. among the poorest girls. (Not saying the rich girls didn't get knocked up--they did.) Nearest abortion clinic was over an hour away. Indiana has parental notification (maybe even consent) laws. But something that always struck me was that these girls by and large were not panicking or considering abortion or even adoption. Even if the babies were "unplanned." Since there weren't college or career plans really for these girls, a baby wasn't the big interruption for them.
When we look at different sex-ed programs, we need to compare not just them to each other, but to what they accomplish IN INDIVIDUAL SCHOOLS.
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lots of proof of successful sex ed
we can look to Europe where the teen birth rate is much lower, along with STDs in teen, and abortion rate. All lower than the US.
They have factual instructions on birth control and disease prevention without religous moralizing.
Most interesting, their teen sex rate is also lower.
(My guess is because they have a more realistic knowledge of the consequences beyond "it's a sin.")
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number of providers...
86 percent of counties in this country have no abortion provider. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between thos counties and the increase in unwanted pregnancies. Bet there is.
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Sex ed and birth control....
Anon, thanks for your input about growing up in Indiana. I think it is different in blue states, who knew? In Maryland, we had sex ed in 7th grade I think, either 6th or 7th, and it covered everything; both the plumbing and birth control aspects. Our teacher even answered kids questions about things like oral sex.
Personally, I could've done with *more* sex ed, not less. It isn't enough just to tell kids about birth control, more needs to be done to empower insecure young women looking for approval from men to be able to demand condom use. I *never* am able to understand the rights views against better education, better forms of birth control, and better access to it; those should be our biggest tools in combatting abortion rates. If we want to reduce abortions we need to make it easier for women to control their reproductive health.
But to the right, it's more important that we keep our legs closed. Which is why what they say will never make sense; it's all founded in an illogical belief that they have the right to dictate the sexual behavior of every woman in America.
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Sex ed in 1960s schools
Like the previous "Anon," my Illinois school district had only minimal "sex ed." The "growing up movie" was shown to 5th and 6th grade girls and their mothers by the school nurse. The equivalent for boys was shown to 7th and 8th graders and their fathers. One year of biology was required for high-school grad. but only the "advanced" classes included detailed sex ed.
I would guess that the vast majority of girls in my school (and maybe even boys) abstained from sex until at least college. Most came from strong religious backgrounds but attended public school because private alternatives were pretty much non-existent. The handful who "got into trouble" almost always got married. Period. End of story. (Well, not really, but you get my drift...)