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October 22, 2007
If you’ve read
the news, and if you’re not banging your head against the wall, you
must be pulling out hairs…or at least scratching the scalp raw. What
were they thinking of?
Wednesday night,
October 17, grown adults on the Portland School Committee in Maine
voted to extend approval of condoms for junior high students to a
wider approval of the full range of birth control options.
School-based health clinics will now be in the business of dispensing
birth control to students ages 11 to 13…confidentially…without
informing their parents.
This decision
shows the muddled thinking of adults who, while loving children, have
lost track of the best interests of children. Richard Verrier, who
supported the vote for birth control, told the Associated Press, “it’s
not enough to depend on parents to protect their children because
there may be students who can’t discuss things with their parents.”
Well, Mr.
Verrier, it’s too bad the Portland School Committee failed to act as
“caring parents” to “protect their children.” Any loving parent will
know that a child 11 to 13 is not old enough to engage in sexual
activity of any kind. A loving parent protecting their child would
take every possible step to teach, counsel, mentor and direct their
child away from sexual activity.
Instead,
Portland School Committee members acted as rebuffed taxpayers who do
not want to spend dollars on rearing babies born to children. Even
when the district provided condoms at their clinics they reported that
17 middle school students had become pregnant in the last four years,
seven of them in the 2006-7 school year.
Responding to
teen sex as a teen pregnancy issue, their emphasis on birth control
tells students that having sex is not the problem. Having babies is
what the adults who “care about them” object to.
One must wonder
at the factual information the Committee relied on to make their
decision. Firstly, teen sex is not just a problem when it creates
babies.
Valerie Huber,
Executive Director of the National Abstinence Education Association
points out the obvious. “Whenever an 11-year old is having sex, there
is a problem much bigger than whether or not she will become pregnant
because a child that young who has the opportunity to have sex - let
alone feels she is mature enough to deal with the physical and
emotional effects of intercourse - is, in most cases, seeking intimacy
and approval because it is void on all other levels in her life.”
This search for
love is what leads to teen pregnancy. Engaging in the lives of teens,
demonstrating true affection and love for their welfare, is a costly
investment. But it is what prevents teen pregnancy. Instead of
providing what teens really need, the Committee opted to throw pills
and condoms at them.
They will be
disappointed. They will continue to witness teen births. Given
typical use, the overall failure rate for condoms in preventing
pregnancy is approximately 15%. For teens, this failure rate
increases to 22%. When you promote condoms to teens, you are
promoting a 22% failure rate.
Likewise,
chemical birth control has its own failure rates. Dr. Patricia Sulak,
a leading researcher of birth control, makes it a practice to ask her
adult audiences to raise their hands if they or someone they know
became pregnant while using the birth control pill. With regularity,
the room is filled with hands waving in the air.
Evaluating
contraception failure rates for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs),
the Committee has now become a key causative factor in this epidemic.
Condoms, despite regular media hype, fail to prevent serious STD
infections, including incurable genital herpes. One in five people
over the age of 12 now have genital herpes and carry the virus on body
areas not covered by the condom. Talk about failure!
And if you want
to ensure failure, just give a pack of birth control pills or a patch
to an eleven-year-old. Reassured by adults she trusts that she is
“protected” against pregnancy, what chance is there that she will also
use condoms? Chemical contraception offers absolutely NO protection
against STDs. Automatic failure!
Committee
members will find themselves regretting their actions, even if it takes
several years for them to see their error. Not so for the teens who
accept the Committee “solutions” for teen pregnancy.
These teens will
begin reaping the “rewards” of failure right away. They will
experience the failures of the solutions promoted by adults who wanted
a quick fix at the expense of teens who will be left to deal with the
here and now failures of the quick fix.
Contraception
will fail to safeguard our children. And by leading our children to
contraception, the Committee has failed our children. A double dose
of failure…and we will all pay the final price.
**********
May 29, 2006
Why Condoms Will Not Save Us
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for past editorials.
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