Aside from treating girls' bodies as their parents' property--and I think it's highly immoral to allow parents to force their daughters to carry a pregnancy against the daughters' will--I was most struck by the part at the end of the NYT article in which Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey was advocating for a rider providing money for sex ed classes, which was struck down. The response from Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma was "How many people really think it's in the best interest of young people to be sexually active outside of marriage? Does anything positive ever come from that?'

There are so many vile and untrue assumptions encoded in there.

The biggest one, of course, is that the assumption that sex ed leads to greater numbers of teenagers having early sex. Anecdotally, I haven't found this to be the case. At all. Much the opposite, actually. I tell you, in high school, I learned how to solve quadratic equations, figure out the area of a circle, and how a bill becomes a law. I do absolutely none of those things regularly. Teenagers don't have sex because they learn the biology, the consequences, and various ways of amending the consequences in school. The related assumption is that the best way to keep kids from having sex is to keep them in the dark about it. Really? If we don't tell kids about sex they just won't experiement on their own? That doesn't ring true to me at all.

There's also the assumption that premarital teenage sex is inarguably bad, and abstinence is inarguably good. I disagree. Abstinence that is based on fear, lies, lack of recourse to contraception and abortion--I don't think that's good at all. It's a very different thing from abstinence based on deciding that you're not ready, that there's no one around that you want to have sex with, that you don't care how much your dumb boyfriend pressures you.

"How many people really think it's in the best interest of young people to be sexually active outside of marriage?"
Well, I do. I think it's in young people's best interests to be sexually active outside of marriage. It beats the hell out of fifteen-year-olds being sexually active within marriage, in my opinion. Marriage is a far-reaching life decision with serious consequences. That's an activity that should be saved for full maturity. I think that if young people marry without having sexual experience they will have far worse times communicating to each other what they want and need sexually, because they'll be less likely to know. I think that young people will be more likely to confuse lust with love if they don't have sex before marriage. I think lots of good stuff can come out of young people having pre-marital sex: fun, happiness, closeness, all the things that people get out of sex.

It seems more and more that this administration tries to force us back to the 1950s, a truly repellant decade in my opinion. The disenfranchisement of large groups of black voters, outlawing abortion, making birth control harder to get, getting rid of sex ed, an on-going war with no end in sight...the only bright spot I can see is that the 1950s gave birth to my mother's generation, the teenagers of the 1960s, who saw exactly what kind of damage was done by such policies.

I'm sorry for the length; this proposed law enrages me.

In the Senate Debate, Hillary C. made a moving, thoughtful and worth reading speech against this appallingly crass and cruel proposal:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?position=all&page=S8159&dbname=2006_record

While I disagree with her postion in favor of the war, this was one hell of a speech.

EG, this bill has made me almost too angry to speak, frankly.

Cheers,

TH

Can minors cross state borders on their own say by train or hitching or something?
Not tying to make a point I just wanted to know......

I wonder if abortion pills will apear on those online pharmacy websites (unless they already are) if this is restricted more...

Did anyone notice the title of the NY Times Article: "Senate Removes Abortion Option for Young Girls." I wrote a letter to The Times, but aren't young girls of the age of 5 or so? I doubt a seventeen year old would call herself a "young girl." If getting your first period is an entrance to womanhood, I would hardly call teens seeking abortions "young girls."