Check out this piece in the Albany Times Union by Sens. Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton on the importance of prevention. Great stuff. They specifically tout their Prevention First Act.
...This legislation would help to reduce the rates of unintended pregnancy in our nation, decrease abortions and improve access to women's health care.Our proposal includes common- ground, common-sense policies.
It makes family-planning services more accessible to low-income women. It improves awareness and understanding of emergency contraception, a poorly understood yet highly effective form of contraception.
It ensures that government-funded sex education programs provide medically accurate information about contraception.
It also ends insurance discrimination against women. Right now, many policies cover Viagra, but not prescription contraceptives. That is wrong, and our legislation will change it.
Reid and Clinton also point out that those who are the most opposed to abortion often are also against contraception. (Shocker.)
For more information check out NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Prevention First Challenge for Common Ground.
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The abstainence only folks just don't seem to get it. Our media these days is saturated with sex, and to expect people to abstain just because it's what they want them to do is ludacris. It's like they expect our entire culture to wake up one day and decide to be Mennonites or Quakers. It's not going to happen so long as money can be made by using sexual imagry, and other media. Lets face it, human beings are one of the few species that use sex for recreation. To suppress that is to go against human nature. Encourgaing and teaching safe sex, along with providing access to contraceptives just makes sense. It's like we have a schism in our culture, teens are told by one side that sex should wait until marriage, and another side uses saturates them with sexual imagry. I know what side a teen soaked in hormones is probably going to go with. The anti-sex conservitives don't seem to grasp the reality of this fact. Actually they don't seem to grasp any reallity whatsoever.
The Prevention First campaign is a great step, and should be used to put anti-choicers in the hot seat. If they think abortion is so bad, why not help prevent the unintended pregnancies to begin with? But I also think that Clinton (and all of us supporting prevention first) must be careful not to ignore issues besides access to contraception that must be addressed to prevent unintended pregnancies. These may include cultural barriers to the use of contraception even if they are available and miseducation about the effectiveness of contraception -- particularly the pill and condoms -- and about STD prevention. Prevention First is a necessary and long-overdue step. But it's only a first step, and it won't do the heavy lifting on its own.
We also need to consider improving the conditions women and children live with so that having a child makes sense.
See, if someone were to attempt, a la Peter Singer, to argue against abortion/contraception from a purely atheistic, ethical standpoint, I'd have no problem with that. I might still disagree, but hey. Problem is, the conditions necessary for such an argument to work DO NOT EXIST. Nor does such an argument exist WITHOUT a latent religious bias.
I hate when religious types try to argue ecumenically--be in on science, philosophy, or ethics. They try and fail every time, because in attempting to argue logically, they forget that their very faith requires them to abandon both logic and skepticism. It's a total farce.