After reading about the meeting held in Gloucester Wednesday this week about the teenage pregnancy problem, I think I see why there's a problem there:
"More than a month after a Time magazine report about an alleged pregnancy pact thrust this seaside city into the worldwide spotlight, Gloucester school officials last night turned to a host of teen pregnancy experts for help on the issue."
"School Committee member Val Gilman recalled her own tough conversation about safe sex with her now 20-year-old daughter when she was 12. "
How incredibly sad and disturbing. Why is a parent having a talk about "safe sex" with a 12-year old? Why have parents and teachers utterly abdicated their responsibilities to their own children? Do we teach children how to do "safe drugs" or "safe cigarette smoking"? Why is it we can tell kids not to drink and smoke, but we can't tell children not to engage in sex? There are a host of reasons to teach children not to be sexually active: moral, medical, emotional, economic.
"Patricia Quinn of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, said teens who are already sexually active need access to confidential contraception, and there’s no evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs work."
Is Patricia Quinn deaf? Many of the pregnant Gloucester High School teens were trying to get pregnant. Short of somebody injecting these girls with Depoprovera, all the access to birth control in the world wouldn't have prevented these pregnancies. What teenager can't walk into any CVS or WalMart and buy condoms and birth control foam? Birth control has never been so easily available as it is now, so this is clearly not about access to birth control.
How can adults be so blind? So many of that generation think that being sexually active is some sort of "inalienable right", a harmless and consequence-free activity that kids are just gonna do anyway. Yet studies show that the majority of teens in fact aren't sexually active, so why do we assume they are? Why encourage them to have sex when we could be giving them reasons not to, which many young people want? These adults refuse to see the incredible harm caused by the so-called "sexual liberation" movement. It just can't be questioned by these folks.
"City officials have said that some of the fathers were in their 20s, raising the possibility of statutory rape, because some of the girls were under age 16 when they were impregnated."
Book 'em, Danno. That's one outcome of the sexual liberation movement, it's easier for adult men to have sex with teenagers. And "teen pregnancy experts" are calling for high schools to dispense birth control. These "experts" are right up there with Planned Parenthood in enabling older men to take advantage of younger women. Is that supposed to be liberating and progressive?
The mayor and a music teacher quoted in the Boston Globe article appear to be clued in, as both criticized popular culture's "glamorization" of sexual permissiveness and teen pregnancy. The pervasive message peddled on TV, in the movies and in the music industry is that girls should be "hot", everybody is running around having sex, and there's something wrong with you if you aren't. This needs to be rectified. Parents need to teach their kids that the prevailing popular culture isn't a good touchstone for their morality or behaviour.
How many of these Gloucester teens came from stable families where a father was present? I'm guessing most did not. Very sad situation for these young women and their families.
We are finding this in the UK as well. all the infor is given to schoolchildren about safe sex but nobody is saying that one can also say no. In fact we have a bill in our parliament being read just to include in the schools advise that one can say now. The first reading only narrowly succeeded by about 67 to 61 so that it can go forward for it's next reading in January 2012. That means 61 MP's rejected the bill advising children that they could say no. They are at present so brainwashed on how to have safe sex that some of them think that that is the normal way forward.
Posted by: Rayblondie Blondie | June 16, 2011 at 03:18 PM