Abstinence-only programs have been found to contain numerous factual errors. (PDF)
What? And if one of Obama’s daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock, will that demonstrate that the sex-ed programs he supports are a failure? All that this demonstrates is that statistics state that some teenagers will get pregnant. The plural of anecdote is not data.
I don’t agree with abstinence-only education either, but harping on this as proof of a point is silly. This is a demonstration of extreme irony and bad timing, not poor sex-ed policy.
Though the OP has recanted, I agree with her original position.
I said in another thread that I think this is a time when loaded politicized terms are getting in the way of communication. I am going to hear certain terms a certain way: choice, privacy, have/keep her baby, etc.
In fact, it’s the “privacy” statements that infuriate me more. Don’t get in my face, pols, and tell me that her decisions are private when you don’t want my decisions to be private. Grr.
Would using an actual shotgun be considered passe in that situation? Would Palin be more likely to use a handgun or hunting rifle to force the marriage? Where’s US magazine when we need them?
I believe there are actually three factors at play:
A legal choice to abortion which pro-lifers would like to see overturned and pro-choicers would like to keep available. A legal choice to adoption which in the past has been enforced decision and not a choice for white, single women (i.e. their babies have been taken away from them).
A moral choice - the believe that I may not have an abortion myself, but I do not believe that moral choice should be enforced on others. Or I may believe in the morality of abortion under some circumstances, but not under others. I may find its immoral to place a child for adoption because it is the wrong gender, or to raise a child if you are sixteen and making a go of it without very supportive parents.
A practical choice. I may make a legal and moral choice to have an abortion, but if I’m a 15 year old woman six hours from the nearest clinic that will perform an abortion, with pro-life parents - or a woman in a rural area unable to take the day off work to go to the clinic for financial reasons - I may in fact, not really have a choice. I may want to parent the child, but I may have unsupportive parents and a deadbeat of a birthfather and the practical reality may be that its best for me and the child to make an adoption plan. I might want to make an adoption plan, but the practical reality is that my mother has determined its immoral for me to give up her grandchild, and unless I’m willing to risk a breach with my parents, its impractical for me to do anything else than become a mother. While pro-lifers have been trying to make abortion illegal, they’ve also been trying to make it impractical.
These decisions are never easy - and its is never as simple as “a choice.”
When we adopted we learned (and it was ten years ago, it may have changed) that social workers and psychologists dealing with birthmothers see the adoption/parent “choice” as independent and separate from the abortion/bear child choice. Which seems odd to me - I’ve always figured its a “what to do about the end result - the baby” decision. But apparently, people who look into it say its a “what to do about the pregnancy decision” followed by a “what to do about the baby” decision if the second decision is still necessary.
Without actually reading the 164-page PDF, the findings of which I doesn’t surprise me in the least, it better illustrates abstinence-only’s failures than Bristol Palin’s situation does. After all, can anyone say for certain that she never, EVER received comprehensive sex education in her home or elsewhere? It’s anecdotal and we don’t really have all the information anyhow. Better to look at the behavior and education of entire segments of the teenage population combined with trends in pregnancy and STD-infection rates.
Thank you for the info and helping me illustrate my point. If it sheds any light on my position, I fully discussed STDs, unplanned pregnancy and condom use with my son. I hope those discussions stuck with him. Obviously, though, I’m no stranger to teenage impulsiveness, so if he does end up making poor choices, it won’t be for lack of knowledge.
Finally, I don’t expect children to get this information solely in the classroom. Parents need to step up to the plate and educate their kids as well. Abstinence-only education wouldn’t stop me from imparting a dose of reality with my kids.
True, but with a proper sex-ed class, teenagers are informed of the risks of conception even when using birth control. If a teenager from such a class gets pregnant, it doesn’t indicate that the program was a failure–only that the student was unlucky.
An abstinence-only program, on the other hand, doesn’t allow for such contingencies. If the program is really working, then those teenagers shouldn’t be having sex at all, thereby resulting in zero pregancies.*
I’ll concede this point. I don’t know exactly what Bristol Palin’s sex-ed experience was like, and without that knowledge, I really can’t pick on her as a single statistic to disprove the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs. The stats in Otto’s links are far more persuasive.
I still think it’s very, very likely that the Palin household didn’t encourage much, if any, discussion of birth control options, based on Sarah Palin’s stated opposition to “explicit” sex-ed programs (which I interpret as an endorsement of abstinence-only programs).
But it’s also possible that Bristol and her boyfriend DID use a contraceptive device that failed. It’s also possible that they planned to have a baby from the start (despite his statements on his MySpace page), and engaged in intercourse to accomplish this very goal.
I’ll admit that neither of those situations would be the direct result of an abstinence-only program, and I apologize for the hi-jack.
*What’s worse to my mind is the misinformation that these programs spread about birth control options, as Otto’s links indicate–e.g., exaggerating the failure rate of condoms, and suggesting that condoms aren’t all that effective at stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.
A teenager from such a program will have been misled into concluding that since no birth control is 100% effective, then birth control isn’t really reliable at all–so if he or she engages in sex anyway without birth control, they’re exposing themselves to a greater risk of an unwanted pregnancy or exposure to a dangerous STD.
“Bristol” ( :rolleyes: ) is going to have a convenient miscarriage soon anyway, so this is all pretty moot.
Funny that I said that to my Political Parties and Campaigns teacher the other day: it’s amazing how people are pro-choice only until the choice is to keep the baby, then it’s attack, attack, attack. She didn’t like that too much and quickly diverted the discussion to other problems she had with Palin.
We should just call it what it really is: pro and anti abortion.
Huh? You think that pro-choice people are angry if someone chooses to keep a baby? That’s one of the choices available, and if it is their choice… wonderful.
If you really and truly believe the two sides should be called pro-abortion or anti-abortion then you pretty much remove yourself from any intelligent discussion of the topic because that’s asinine.
She didn’t like it because it’s a lie. Cite for anyone saying Palin should have aborted the baby?
I didn’t think so.
:rolleyes:
I think nearly all pro-choice people have no problem with women who choose to keep the baby (and I only say “nearly” because there’s always one or two whackjobs out there). I mean, ultimately do you really think everyone who’s pro-choice is against all births? That they think everyone should have an abortion? That humans should go extinct? :dubious:
I think in Bristol’s case people are just a little dubious about how much the “choice to keep her baby” was really her choice. Do you really think that the unmarried 17-year-old daughter of a vociferously pro-life governor running for Republican VPOTUS has much “choice” in the matter?
Maybe your professor changed the subject because she realized that your argument wasn’t too bright and it would take too long and be a waste of time to discuss it any further.
The pro-choice people are attacking her for supporting her pregnant daughter, who remarkably enough made a choice. if you’re pro-choice, how do you have any sort of moral authority for attacking someone who made the choice?
So a few people question if the underage daughter of a militant pro-lifer is actually making a choice or being “convinced” of it and that means that all people are either pro or anti abortion? Is this how you draw all conclusions in your life? Seriously?
This is a lie without a cite.
This is about the most retarded thread I’ve come across in a while.
The distinction between pro-choice and pro-life is that the people who call themselves pro-life actively work to limit the choices of women, to exclude legal abortion as a choice. How difficult is that to understand? Just because “Bristol” made a choice between those choices left to her by her mother’s beliefs makes her “pro-choice” only in the mostly semantically abstract way.
And Doors, thanks for continuing to be a dishonest idiot. No one is pro-abortion. I’ve known several women who have had to make this difficult choice, and none of them viewed as anything other than a tragic necessity. So to insist that the issue is abortion rather than choice is to spit in these women’s faces.
I feel the same way. The environment Sarah provided for her daughter was not one that allowed any choice in the matter.
How about a cite? Show us a cite for anyone who’s attacking Palin’s daughter for not having an abortion. Show us a cite for anyone who’s attacking Palin for supporting her daughter. Are you always that much of a stupid, trolling fuck in all your classes? Are you “that guy?” The idot who always thinks he’s calling the instructor on something when he really has no grasp of the topic at all? You are that guy, aren’t you? I remember you from when I was in college.
I think it’s remarks like this that make some people think that Bristol is being attacked. There seems to be an underlying assumption that Bristol would not be having this baby or getting married if it weren’t for her mother, and that without the parental influence to have the baby, her obvious prefernce would be to abort it. I’m not saying that this is your belief, Morgenstern, but there have been plenty of comments around here about shotgun marriages and Bristol being pressured, and how she has to have the baby because it would destroy her mother’s career, etc. Nobody seems to make the assumption that the girl wants to keep the baby. And plenty of people think that the smart decision in such a situation is to abort. A coworker just the other day was talking about some teenager she knows who is having her baby and keeping it, and my coworker’s exact words were “I can’t believe she wants to ruin her life that way, when it’s so easy to take care of it.”
Even if these assumptions were mistaken (not that I think they are), how is that an attack on Bristol? It’s an assumption about her parents, not her.
I have a much easier time accepting that she’d want to keep the baby than get married, but that’s neither here nor there. Her choice isn’t the issue. My issue is with her mother saying “we’re proud of her choice,” when she would have never accepted any other choice (and when she wants to remove that choice as a legal right). In any case, there is certainly no implication coming from any pro-choicers that she should have gotten an abortion.