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Birth Control and Teenage Pregnancy
Published:
April 18, 2012
An encouraging new report shows a big decline in the rate of
teenage births. From 2009 to 2010, the birth rate among young women ages 15 to
19 fell 9 percent, to 34.9 per thousand, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That is a record low for the 65 years that data have been available, and a
remarkable 44 percent drop from the 1991 rate. This good shift is largely the
result of an increase in teenagers’ use of birth control — a fact that
Congressional Republicans ignore as they seek to dismantle reproductive health
programs.
Some voices on the right unconvincingly assign credit for the
latest change to abstinence-only sex education, even though the percentage of
sexually active teenagers has remained fairly constant. Besides, some of the
states with the highest teenage birth rates — like Mississippi, Arkansas,
Oklahoma and Texas — have policies that emphasize teaching abstinence over
comprehensive sex education.
Cassi
Creek:
The GOP/teavangelists can’t wait to
gut the funding for Planned Parenthood, for birth control education, and for
the social safety nets.
The bible thumper icons, speaking from
their media production studios, can’t wait to condemn birth control
education. They repeatedly rail against
the increasing percentages of out of wedlock pregnancies. Yet, their solution is to try to scare
teenagers (and adults) with the concept of eternal punishment at the hands of
some demonic entity, in some subterranean fortress of evil. Such threats have been around since the last
time St. Paul ate moldy rye bread. Out
of wedlock, pregnancies predate those threats by millennia.
The use of “abstinence only” “education”
does not work. Tell hormonally driven
teens that they must abstain from sex and scare them with religious
mythos. The money spent on such idiocy
will be wasted. Sex is enjoyable,
pleasurable, and people will engage in sex whenever they are able. The threats flung about by the evangelists
and other religious fanatics are easily trumped by hormonal imperatives.
There should be mention of other
threats. The GOP/teavangelists voter
base is under the sway of the American Taliban.
They can’t wait to show their hatred of modern culture by punishing
those women unfortunate enough to become pregnant while lacking some religious
rubber stamp document of submission. In
order to reinforce their dislike of single mothers, they can’t wait to punish
them for their refusal to conform to the religious right’s demands.
The punishment that inflicts the worst
pain is economic. They rush to
eliminate food stamps, WIC nutrition programs, and day care, housing and health
care assistance, to make life for single mothers and for poor families as
difficult as possible. They repeatedly
proclaim that they don’t care to pay for birth control for poor women. It offends their priggish, pious natures to
think that poor people might be having sex and enjoying it. In order to punish those they believe guilty
of “sin,” they fall under the thrall of the GOP/teavangelists who are doing
everything possible to bring about a theocracy more repressive than that, which
controls Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The American Taliban is engaged in
spreading their mythos by economic warfare waged upon the working poor, the
former middle class, and the unemployed.
They are being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. They are being denied accurate and timely
information about safe sex and access to birth control by religious hypocrites,
they are being denied family planning help, starved, disposed, disenfranchised,
evicted, denied health care and education in order to force compliance to a
theocracy that is clearly un-Constitutional.
There is no biblical hell beneath the
Earth’s surface. There is no Satan, no eternal
damnation. But the American Taliban is
doing all it can to create a living Hell on Earth for those who refuse to
follow its archaic bigotry.
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