Women's Issues

In honor of a certain "friend" of mine (one who isn't really a friend, but rather a necessary evil that descends on me once a month), I am posting a blog about issues pertaining to women and women's rights today. If you didn't really want to know that my foul-weather friend is visiting...tough. : P

I'll start with the article I read at the gym today that absolutely made my blood boil. According to this article in Glamour magazine, America's religious right is crusading in a major way to end discussions about birth control, emergency contraception, and women's sexual health.

Some of this I already knew, but reading about the zealots who are promoting false information about abortion (causes a higher risk of breast cancer??) and condoms (ineffective--stay abstinent??), I wanted to scream right then and there.

In the past couple of years, I have had one friend tell me I'm liberal (like its a bad thing) and my parents wondering aloud what they did wrong to make me vote a certain way. Let me tell you, people. I'm sick and tired of the "morally superior" of this country acting like sex is an evil act. If that makes me "liberal," well, so be it (I still maintain that I'm about as middle-of-the-road moderate as a person can get).

If we are not careful, this country is going to go backwards, back to a time of back-alley abortions and no Pill. Is that what we want for our daughters?

Now, on to the next thing that pisses me off to no end: Abstinence-only sex education. Yes, let's refuse to teach kids how to use a condom, and let them all get infected by horrible diseases. I hope these people are ready to be young grandparents, or nursing their children through HIV/AIDS, because most of the kids who make a promise of abstinence until marriage don't make it.

Take your average 16-year-old. Even when raised in a Christian home, a child who made a promise to remain abstinent until marriage is not immune to hormonal impulses, peer pressure, and the feelings of love/lust that convince every teenager that "this is the real deal."

Studies are showing that more than half of the kids who make these promises break them within a year.

And if all they've had is abstinence-only education, I fear for their health, and their futures, because "pulling out" doesn't work.

And we are finding out, also the hard way, that abstinence-only education isn't working.

I have been teaching just long enough to know that telling kids that sex outside of marriage is "likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects" is tantamount to handing them a loaded revolver and hoping they don't pull the trigger.

In other words, it's about the biggest pile of educational bullshit I've ever run across.



I really worry about my rights if this trend continues.