The Portland, Maine school board is allowing school personnel to dispense birth control to girls as young as eleven without the knowledge or consent of their parents. Is this reasonable or unacceptable?\u00a0 Would you want your eleven year old daughter using birth control without your knowledge?\u00a0 Does availability of birth control promote sexual activity in teenagers?\u00a0 Does the school system have the right to get involved in this issue or are they interfering with the family?<\/p>\n
The United States has higher rates of teenage pregnancy and abortion than other comparable industrialized nations.\u00a0 About 1,000,000 teenagers get pregnant each year with roughly one third of these pregnancies ending with an abortion.\u00a0 The realities of these numbers are difficult to ignore.\u00a0 And the options available to address this are few.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With nearly a million teenagers getting pregnant each year, the message on abstinence is not working as well as we would like.\u00a0 But shouldn’t this be the ideal we seek?\u00a0 In our culture it seems impossible for abstinence education to have any type of useful impact.\u00a0 We expose our youth to magazines, television, movies, and music advocating and normalizing everything but abstinence.\u00a0 The only rarity is a monogamous heterosexual married couple.\u00a0 Aren’t our youth just imitating what we are modeling for them?\u00a0 If we want abstinence to work don’t we need to make some improvements in our culture for that to happen?<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, abstinence is given credit for a fourth of the current decline in the teenage pregnancy rates. Equally surprising to me, several medical studies I read advocated abstinence education.\u00a0 I was impressed because I thought they would mainly discuss birth control and abortion.\u00a0 But these authors felt teenagers were not physically, emotionally, or financially prepared to make decisions about sexual activity leading them to believe abstinence was the best option.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Motherhood, with or without adoption, has always been an option and is the outcome in roughly 50% of these teenage pregnancies.\u00a0 I still remember in grade school occasionally hearing the adults whisper about a classmate’s older sister “going away” for about a year because she “got in trouble.”\u00a0 Although I could not find any data, I wonder if this option may be exercised less often since abortion has become legal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With about 350,000 teenage abortions a year, legalized abortion has succeeded at its real intended purpose, aborting unwanted pregnancies.\u00a0 But regardless of anyone’s personal position on Roe v Wade, I think we would all agree abortion is not the best solution to unwanted teenage pregnancies.\u00a0 And if teenagers are not emotionally and physically prepared to make decisions about sexual activity, how can they be capable of dealing with abortion.<\/p>\n
Another option is birth control.\u00a0 But what happens if you make birth control available to teenagers?\u00a0 Won’t they just see that as adult endorsement of teenage sexual activity?\u00a0 To the contrary, the medical literature suggests those teenagers who have decided to postpone sexual activity to a more appropriate age are predicted to not change their values just because they now have access to birth control.\u00a0 And those teenagers who are going to engage in sexual activity are not going to abstain if they do not have access to birth control. \u00a0This makes sense in light of 1,000,000 unintended teenage pregnancies each year.<\/p>\n
As previously stated, CDC data suggests the rate of teenage pregnancies is decreasing.\u00a0 These decreases are attributed to abstinence and birth control with abstinence responsible for a fourth of the decrease. It is amazing that in our ultra-liberal society a part of the decrease in teenage pregnancies is attributable to abstinence.\u00a0\u00a0 So what do we do?\u00a0 Can we do a better job promoting abstinence?\u00a0 Or should we allow our schools to provide birth control to teenagers without parental consent?\u00a0 Should we allow them to provide it to youth as young as eleven?\u00a0 Does your opinion change knowing the data suggests that for every three pregnancies prevented one abortion is prevented?\u00a0 More important, should your opinion change knowing the data suggests that for every three pregnancies prevented one abortion is prevented?<\/p>\n
A significant part of the campaign for legalizing abortion was the belief that many women were dying from illegal abortions.\u00a0 The logic was that we should legalize abortion to prevent these deaths.\u00a0 But is it logical if people are breaking the law and getting hurt, we need to change the law rather than tell people to change their behavior?\u00a0 Did society accept the lesser of two evils?\u00a0 Can’t we use the same logic with teenage birth control?\u00a0 With 350,000 teenage abortions a year should we provide birth control to teenagers without parental consent to decrease abortions?\u00a0 Is the lesser of two evils a valid argument?\u00a0 Has our society transitioned from right and wrong being absolutes to right and wrong being relative and negotiable?<\/p>\n
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