ProWomanProLife

…before there is an emergency.

On the surface, ‘Be Prepared’ seems like an infallible motto of expecting the unexpected. Championed by organizations like the Red Cross and Scouts, it’s a battle call of readiness. So when the National Health Service promoted access to the morning-after pill today under this banner, the save-the-day heroes of preparedness that marched in my mind came to a screeching halt.

Released just after the airing of the Marie Slopes advertisements on abortion services on UK television, the draft guidance feels like the second blow to an already crumbling attempt in Britain to support the alternatives to abortion.

It recommends that pharmacies should offer the morning-after pill in advance, particularly for those under 25.

They should be “advised that emergency contraception is more effective the sooner it is used” and that an intra-uterine device is more effective in an emergency but can also be used long term, NICE said.

The results of this ‘be prepared’ strategy are yet to be projected, but I’d bet my Girl Scout sash it’s going to be an increase in chemical abortions and unknown physical and emotional toll on the young women who regularly undergo them.

Great interview in Macleans on teenage girls:

For girls, I use this term “anorexia of the soul,” which I first read in a New York Times article. What I understand it to mean is that this girl is wasting away on the inside. She’s obsessed with surface—being the best student, or the fastest runner—but inside, her sense of self is undernourished, it’s starving. She doesn’t realize it because people keep praising her for being the top student or the fastest runner, and her sense of self gets tied up in that surface. I just don’t see that with boys. You will certainly find a lot of boys who are very comfortable, when you ask them to tell you about themselves, saying, “Well, I’m a really good gamer.” That’s also a pretty impoverished sense of self, but it doesn’t seem to bother the boys. And unfortunately, perhaps, they’re more robust and less prone to existential collapse than girls. That boy who’s a champion gamer is not going to fall apart if some other guy gets to level two in a game before he does. That’s okay, he still has status among other boys. Whereas the girl whose identity consists of being the “smart girl” or “Justin’s girlfriend” tends to crumble if she doesn’t get into the university of her choice or if Justin dumps her.

I think if we understood these realities a bit better, the whole abortion as empowerment idea would crumble, because it becomes clearer and clearer to me that a great many girls (and women) have an abortion because someone else told them too, or didn’t support them, or said or implied they wouldn’t love her anymore if she didn’t. Tragic.

I should start this post by saying I’m not advocating for teen motherhood.

But I will say that this article about how timing in our culture for mothers is all wrong struck a chord with me. And I’ve recently been having lots of thoughts about how this extended childhood we sanction in our society is ridiculous. People turn 40 and still live as if they were 14, albeit playing video games in their own basement instead of their parents.

Teens can be very capable. We coddle them in our culture. They could be out and about contributing much earlier than we let them. Or than I did, to be very blunt, by pursuing many multiple very important degrees.

Now I can see how one would not win big on the lecture circuit with this point, highlighted by the Globe’s Leah Maclaren of all people, but based on the ideas of one Hilary Mantel who I know not. But not wanting to be outdone on the unpopularity file, I will say this. If teens are going to be moms and dads, they should get married first.

(This moment of political incorrectness was brought to you courtesy of the one who thinks Sarah Palin actually is an advocate for women. Know your source, they say, know your source.)

One of the most contentious things one can say today is that abortion is being used as a form of birth control. With our abortion rates, it’s an obviously true statement, but yet this lives in the domain of the unspeakable.

Now UK Department of Health data shows it to be true.

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Brigitte rolls her eyes: Of course it’s happening. And everybody knows it (except perhaps those who aren’t yet sure quite how babies are made). But if we start admitting it then we’ll start having to debate why it’s a bad idea to use abortion so casually. And if we’re debating why it’s a bad idea to use abortion so casually, someone at some point will start wondering out loud why it’s OK to have one or two abortions but not four or six, leading to all kinds of awkward questions for dedicated pro-abortion types. So much easier just to deny it’s happening and move on right along.

I tend to agree with this op-ed in the Post today about normalizing teen pregnancy through shows like 16 and Pregnant. We shouldn’t make teen pregnancy look easy because it’s not. Neither are teen abortions.

As a result, we shouldn’t also make teen sex look so easy. But the author won’t touch that issue:

Positive reviewers have called the show “educational ” and “sweet and touching.” But those words say more about the people using them — for they suggest an increasingly casual attitude toward the underlying subject matter. Maybe when contraceptive use drops among young females, and 16-year-old girls begin dropping out of school to start families, the wisdom of such attitudes will be revisited.

If we are going to say teens will be teens–they are going to have sex anyway, then I’d advocate for teaching them about marriage, making their already very serious sexual committments permanent, and worrying less as a society about whether our kids have advanced degrees.

I know the abortion clinics are filled with girls who never envisioned getting pregnant with the guy she was having sex with, and now she feels she must have an abortion to escape his memory. If that is the case–why on earth are we treating sex so lightly? A girl who doesn’t actually like a guy should not be having sex with him.

And if these are little Romeos and Juliets–well then, get married and have kids. Enough already with engaging in adult behaviours while studiously avoiding–or glorifying–the sometimes difficult adult outcomes.

Crossed this article:

Sexual coercion and “reproductive control,” including contraceptive sabotage, are a common, and devastating, facet of dating and domestic abuse.

The article basically links pregnancy among teens to partner abuse. So what is the prevailing belief over at RH Reality Check? “We need to get even more dating-violence education into the schools.” They acknowledge:

Researchers, including Teitelman, are also studying exactly how parents can best educate their kids, not just about the birds and the bees, but also about standing up to sexual coercion. (In one study, Teitelman found teen girls whose mothers had talked to them about resisting sexual pressure were twice as likely to delay sex, or use condoms during sex; when fathers did the same, they were five times more likely to have safe sex.)

I suppose if RH Reality Check is going to allude to the idea that parents should encourage abstinence, it is only fitting that the info be shrouded in brackets toward the end of the article. And yet they insist the focus should be on getting more sex ed “in the schools.”

In this same article, a nurse practitioner points out, “We’re giving teens all this information about prevention in the clinic, and yet I see them back all the time for STI testing.”

So in this article we’ve outlined that the parent thing works well, and that learning about condoms from a stranger (even if they’re a medical professional) doesn’t work well. So we need to elaborate sex ed in schools. Something about not being able to see the forest for the trees…

(Though I’m being a bit critical here, the article is worth a read. It sheds light on a topic we don’t hear enough about.)

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Rebecca adds: “Contraception sabotage” – this is an area ripe for study. I’ve never had a male friend own up to deliberately sabotaging his partner’s birth control, although I don’t suppose many men ‘fess up to it, especially to female friends. I do, on the other hand, know women who’ve quite consciously lied about birth control (explicitly, as in claiming to be on the pill when they’re not; or implicitly, when they stop taking it or “accidentally” miss a week; or say “it’s a safe time” when it’s not, or might not be) and think it was a perfectly fine thing to do, because the guys wanted to marry them, just needed a nudge, ya know? And there are many other situations where I suspect something similar might have happened.

A lot of these relationships ended badly. Not a surprise, given how little trust must exist for those shenanigans to take place. A couple of them are still married a decade later. Still doesn’t justify that kind of lying, in my opinion. At any rate, tricking a guy into fathering a child is as despicable as coercing or intimidating your girlfriend into having a child. And it’s something a lot of people condone, or turn a blind eye to, in my experience.

What a lot of useless drivel in this letter to the editor in yesterday’s Citizen.

Jeanette Doucet of Planned Parenthood Ottawa has come to the realization that—wait for it—sex is good. And she wants all teens to know. No kidding.

But wait for it, she’s got more: “we [Planned Parenthood Ottawa] don’t tell [youth] not to have sex and we don’t tell them that sex is bad.”

So let me get this straight. You are aware that sex is about “more than plumbing.” And you are aware that the waters of sexual relationships are always tough to navigate—would be more so for a teen. And you won’t tell youth not to have sex? Really? I’m not sure that Sex with Sue would give that advice.

I guess I can understand how she comes to this conclusion. Because in her world, the appropriate dialogue with the appropriate counselor actually eradicates a teenager’s fears of pregnancy, or of being alone, or unloved or of having some sort of sexually transmitted disease. If we could only just all spend more time with… her.

And when an unwanted pregnancy comes along–and let’s keep in mind most teen pregnancies are–she’s the same counselor to point that girl in the direction of the abortion clinic. Come to think of it, with this advice, she is deliberately creating those unwanted pregnancies.

It all comes down to a worldview. And Jeanette here may say she thinks sex is about more than plumbing but she doesn’t actually believe it. If she did, she’d be forced to concede that sex for teens is a bad idea—as they enmesh their souls time after time after time with disposable partners—in an era where we teach kids not to settle down until all else is settled—typically by the time they are done their university degrees. Say you have sex at 16—well, that could mean ten full years of sexual drifting. That can’t possibly be a good thing.

Ah, advice from Planned Parenthood–courtesy of your tax dollars and mine.

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Tanya adds: But let’s never suggest that abortion is a profitable industry and Planned Parenthood is its McDonald’s.  Actually, McDonald’s has more scruples, I dare say.  But the day they start selling Rolaids for profit with your Big Mac combo…

A devastating look into teens’ sexual lives (not for the faint of heart).

What floors me is that there are tons of parents out there, including parents of teenagers, who have no idea what’s going on. I know what’s going on (well, I have a reasonably good idea) and I don’t have a teenage daughter. What’s their excuse?

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Tanya adds: The advice on curbing this behavior in your teen?  “Alot of the experts we talked with said, ‘You have to parent today…double time.’ “  Like with so many of life’s problems, the solution is often to do twice as much of what was missing in the first place.
 
I realize that many people feel they don’t have a choice in the matter, and some in fact don’t.  But the average child today starts their life out in full-time daycare.  As parents, we spend more time than ever at a job that our children can’t even relate to.  (We’re bank proof operators or acturial scientists.)  That means, not only do we not know what they do all day, but they can’t imagine what we do either.  And this sets a pattern for the long-term relationship between our kids and us.
 
My daughter just finished her first year of preschool.  Away from me just six hours a week, I could hardly believe all the things I was not in the immediate know about.  Just six hours a week and she chose a new favorite colour without me.  She decided skirts were better than pants but not as good as dresses.  She’d established that boys are bad because they hit and girls do not.  And her idea of a really fun game is one where you get to stand on a chair and wave your arms.  She made all these decisions without me around.  Next year she’ll be up to 11 hours a week and I’ll have so much more to keep on top of.  I think all this preschool stuff is to get ME ready for kindergarten.
 
When she’s 12 and being confronted with choices girls her age are faced with, here’s hoping I’ll have done a good job establishing solid communication and trust.  Pink or purple?  Not life altering.  Holding hands or oral sex?  A bit of a big deal, wouldn’t you say?

Bristol Palin, who’s going to be the answer to a lot of trivia questions a decade from now, is on the front cover of People magazine. In it, she talks about how unglamorous life with a tiny baby is:

Girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex,” she says of being a teenage mom. “Think about the consequences … If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.”

I’m not sure she’s quite got the point here. If the message is that life with a screaming newborn baby can be stressful, well yes, that’s true. It’s equally unpleasant to be sleep-deprived and subject to nursing woes and diaper changes when not a teenager. And while having other adults around to share in the baby-care makes life easier, the basic hassle involved in the tending of small children is pretty standard, whether you’re a teenager, an adult, married, single, a stay at home mom, work outside the home, you name it.

Bristol Palin’s problem isn’t that she has a screaming newborn baby per se; it’s that she has this baby with whose father she’s already broken up, a not uncommon result of a high school romance; that she’s still totally dependent upon her parents and thus pretty much by definition not prepared to parent herself; and that she has none of the supports in place to help her cope and adjust that are more likely to be available when you are married and at least semi-autonomous before having children.

Don’t get me wrong, if “sex=screaming baby=no social life” stops kids in high school from having sex, more power to them. The thing is, to a certain extent, that equation holds true for adults too, not just teens. The issue isn’t how much work babies are, it’s how much more bearable the work is when you’ve got a husband and supportive family and a bit more maturity to fall back on.

And it’s a wee bit irresponsible for People to run a cover of a beautifully made up, slim and rested-looking Bristol in cap and gown, toting Tripp as an accessory. The text may read “don’t do this” but the sub-text is telling a different story.

Apparently this ad is creating a bit of a kerfuffle. Wonder why, eh? Think it’s likely to discourage teenage sex? [warning: graphic]

The controversial video is the latest weapon used by a local primary care trust in the fight to reduce teen pregnancies, it said.

The clip, dubbed Teenage Kicks, was created by NHS Leicester City and features a girl giving birth on a school playing field surrounded by her peers.

It was created as part of a campaign to warn youngsters about teenage pregnancies.

The video is currently posted on video sharing sites popular with young people, including YouTube and Kontraband, and the primary care trust said it has now been viewed around 72,000 times.

Filmed in the style of a “happy-slapping” on a mobile phone, the video is designed to appeal to young people in a bid to spread the message.

It shows a gang of teens running towards a crowd of other schoolchildren.

In the middle of the jeering crowd is a girl giving labour, while another helps her.

The clip ends with the slogan: “Not what you expected?” followed by, “Being a teenage parent might not be either”.

It then refers young people to the campaign’s website, hey-babe.co.uk