Don't let your schooling interfere with your education.
~ Pete Seeger

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Collateral Damage

I scanned this article detailing the reddest and bluest cities in the nation, and ran across this quote: "Also contradictory, [Lubbock] has a high rate of teenage pregnancy but an abstinence-only sex education policy."

Huh? Hasn't the writer been paying any attention at all to statistics? Probably not. And you don't even need statistics to figure out that abstinence only works 'til it stops. The sex drive is natural, intense, and it isn't going away any time soon. A high rate of teen pregnancy is the natural result of abstinence-only sex education, not contradictory at all. With the confluence of both data and logic teaming to make this obvious, I sometimes wonder if the imposition of these policies isn't a hidden effort to keep women down and economically oppressed.

I don't think so, though. I really think it's just another example of blind ideology trumping common sense, and women and aborted babies are just collateral damage in the culture wars.

3 comments:

David and Sarah Carrel said...

Hey Seda, thanks for the comment. I have great respect for Mark Twain (and I liked the cartoon movies that came out a while ago, haha).

Anonymous said...

Hey girlie,

Some of my friends have nightmares about spending the night in jail in Texas (for being hippies) and my sister says that girls in Utah tend to marry at 15 have an average of 8 kids and are told that they can't go onto college because only ugly girls do that. The children are neglected and abused and the girls suffer the worst.

Without birth control those babies go somewhere. You ain't stoppin' sex, period. If they aren't aborted, they are abandoned and killed in the time-honored Greek sense or Chinese sense. Birth control is the most humane way to go. Too bad it works so poorly.

What would be great is 100 percent birth control for everyone. The population would go down overnight. People don't believe me, but half the kids I know were accidents conceived through birth control. It's expensive, invasive, and, well, don't get me started.

Not to mention all the women who die in childbirth. The US still has one of the highest maternal death rates in the West-- shameful. Do we need to go back to 50 percent infant and maternal mortality? That's what is was until WWII.

Think if you had seven or eight kids to feed....

my two cents.
hugs
me

Anonymous said...

abstinence only...

o my..

don't get me started...

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
~Helen Keller

Reading List for Information about Transpeople

  • Becoming a Visible Man, by Jamison Green
  • Conundrum, by Jan Morris
  • Gender Outlaw, by Kate Bornstein
  • My Husband Betty, by Helen Boyd
  • Right Side Out, by Annah Moore
  • She's Not There, by Jennifer Boylan
  • The Riddle of Gender, by Deborah Rudacille
  • Trans Liberation, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transgender Emergence, by Arlene Istar Lev
  • Transgender Warriors, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transition and Beyond, by Reid Vanderburgh
  • True Selves, by Mildred Brown
  • What Becomes You, by Aaron Link Raz and Hilda Raz
  • Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
and it is His - the Christ's, our
Beloved's.
~Hafiz