Pro-Obvious

Abortion is one of those nagging little issues that tends to be looked at with a myopic lens of either 'acceptable' or 'unacceptable', black or white.  For some, there are variables in determining the justification, for others, including Mrs. Palin, there is no grey area.  This post isn't entirely about that, because I know we aren't going to come to an agreement on anything today - what we can agree on, is however, curtailing unwanted pregnancies.  This requires an open-mind, and an avoidance of unrealistic expectations of our children.  It's about getting to the root of the issue.

Mrs. Palin believes there isn't ever a scenario where abortion is acceptable--even in a cases of rape, as she asserts in this video. Well, what about when a father rapes and impregnates their own child?  Not even then.  Palin believes the woman should have to give birth to her sibling.  This post isn't entirely about Palin either, but about the closed-minded, insular way of thinking that actually has a counter-productive effect for the desired outcome of these hardliners.

Abortion has always been a grey area for me, and I've never taken a hardline stance on the issue myself.  I will say this - I think abortions should be rare, and a very last resort.  It shouldn't be as easy to get an abortion as it is to get a minor surgery.

But it isn't a 'one-size-fits-all' problem.  There are many reasons, some ethical (as mentioned above), why a woman wouldn't be able to give birth to a child.  On the surface, when people think of abortion, they think of young teens popping in and out of the abortion clinic as casually as if they'd gotten a haircut.  Obviously this isn't the only scenario.  In order to arrive at a way to mitigate the problem, it's important to get to the root of it. 

In the case of young, unprepared mothers -- what led them to becoming impregnated?  (Yes, I'm being serious.  I might have some youngins' reading this blog.)
But seriously - remember when you were in Pre-K and you thought merely kissing someone would get you pregnant?  (No?  Okay, maybe that was just me.)  Flash forward to that child's pubescent awakening and you realize that without some sort of education on the subject, we'd all still be walking around wondering this, and I'm certain many of our primitive ancestors did.  When most kids finally do come around to learning about risks and diseases on their own (not to mention new found responsibilities), it might not be in time since, "according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI, 2001), a small number of early teens are sexually active: two out of ten females, and three out of ten males. However, by the age of 18, 65-70% of teens report being sexually active." (source)

Education is the most important route, and if a lot of these parents wouldn't be so afraid of the "evils of pre-marital sex" and would keep the dialogue open with their children to be a source of trust and information, they'd realize these open exchanges are not tantamount to pimping out their child to the highest bidder. 

What parents tend to do instead is either avoid the topic altogether, or simply tell their children to abstain from it, end of story.  The paradox here, of course, is that this may lead to abortions behind their parents backs in an effort to circumvent punishment.  (So, yeah - pretty counter-productive there, mom.)

As I recall all too clearly, churches even have campaigns where they tell these teens to sign cards pledging to Jesus that they will remain virgins until they are married.  "Abstinence ONLY", they resoundingly declare.  These Abstinence Only programs not only fail to work, but do a disservice to the children they are seeking to shelter from the bondages of their lustful ways.  Of course many parents live under the veil of fantasy when they believe that their child may, for the most part, 'voluntarily'--I stress voluntarily--wait until they are married to tap that ass, but, as the numbers above from 2001 show, this is way out of touch with reality.  I know we would all like to believe that our little angel wears a matching chastity belt everywhere she goes, but not so much.

The leading studies show that Abstinence Only programs do not curtail pre-marital sex and have "no beneficial impact on young people's sexual behavior and had no effect whatsoever in the outcome of sexual experimentation", whereas a study of comprehensive sexual education shows results. 

This seems like it would be a no brainer.  If a teenager is AWARE of the risk of disease and fully informed on how their body's work, then it should go without saying that their awareness will increasingly lead to an application of preventative measures.  It's pretty logical, dontcha think?  If they are just told to not do it, and not much else, then chances are that when they eventually do (not if), they'll dive in without as much foresight as would be provided by a level of awareness that either a good talk, or an education on the subject would provide.  Why is this so hard to understand?

On a personal note, I did have a child out of wedlock with my then girlfriend of several years (though 'out of wedlock' sounds silly to me now), and I was one of those that signed one of those "True Love Waits"/"Abstinence Only" cards as a teen.  Obviously that didn't work.  In my case, I was informed though apparently BC isn't always enough.  However, thankfully I've always had a supportive family behind me, and I never had a doubt that I would.  I was freshly out of the house though, so maybe it was just that much easier for them to swallow, even if not entirely.  This acceptance isn't always the case with many kids these days though, especially when they're still in school, and living at home.

Surely, 'abstinence only' is the ideal route that many parents want for their children, but considering the statistics, it's not the practical one.  It's shown to be comparatively ineffective to a proper sexual education. It's almost obvious that there will never be a predominant consensus reached on abortion -- and we're not going to settle that here today.  However, can we agree that being 'pro-obvious' by properly educating our nation's youth is the very least we can do? 

Sunday School Sex Thought-Crimes

I've gone to church since I was a fetus up until age 19. Every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday morning was spent at church. Now this wasn't so bad when I was a child. I mean, it wasn't extremely often that I'd be hungover on a Sunday morning in my pre-pubescent years so I didn’t have much to gripe about every Sunday morning. Going to church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening for eighteen+ years of my life didn't seem unordinary and it wasn’t that it was relatively easy to do, it just wasn’t relatively harder, or more annoying than any other thing I was expected to do at that age, especially when it was something I’ve always done. (I wont lie, that shit was fun after a while. Do you know that girls go to church? Really pretty girls that might even make-out with you in the church stairwell?) But I didn’t think it was so odd going to church three times a week. You get used to spending that much time in the ‘house of the Lord’ when it's all you've ever known. It was the natural rhythm of how it was. As a matter of fact, I thought it was odd that other kids didn't have to go to church. At first.

As a matter of fact, during my young adult life (age 14-18) I spent virtually every spring break, winter vacation, summer vacation on some church related trip. Now in order to be able to get to go on the trip you had to qualify for it. This meant that you had to go to “Discipleship” on Saturday mornings, participate in the church choir, memorize some bible verses, show up for choir rehearsals, be there Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evenings (as I was already doing anyway). Granted there were some amazing trips – among other things I went skiing in NC, New York, went inside the World Trade Center after all, and sang the national anthem with the choir at an Atlanta Braves game – but a huge majority of these kids, including myself, only tried qualifying in the first place so that they could go on the trip and hang out with girls that (as we understood) had ‘boobies’. (We weren’t sure yet.) We didn’t care much for the ultimate purpose that the church constructed the trip. I don’t blame this on the kids, though. If the church wanted these kids to go on these trips for the right reasons they should try removing the last day of leisure—but even that wouldn’t help much, since I think most parents expected their children to go.

Most of what added to the intrigue of these girls is that the church treated them like sex objects by trying to safeguard them from being treated like sex objects. If by some miracle we ended up being allowed to have co-ed swimming time, the girls would be required to wear a one-piece unitardish bathing suit, which naturally led us to fill in the blanks with our minds. When we were on these trips, the counselors had a big box full of potato sacks (with the bottom cut off) that the girls would have wear around their skirts if the hemline fell above their knees. This only made me sexualize knees at fifteen.









Almost every summer was spent in church camp where it seemed there was no other purpose but to have your sexuality repressed and your natural inclination for sex demonized. I wasn’t even thinking about sex remotely anything close to as much to the amount of times that they brought this up. I only thought about it more after they brought it up. I was usually caught off guard and denying their ludicrous accusations about fornicating. (It's like your parents accusing you at age five of doing crack because you stayed out five minutes past the street lights coming on when all you were really doing was just smoking a little weed for fuck's sake.)



They really knew how to mess with your conscience. (My friend, Jon, got saved at least five times throughout highschool--not kidding.) As if it wasn't enough feeling shame with my body if I were to ever awake with morning wood, they 'encouraged' us to sign these "True Love Waits" cards each and every year, in a parade-like lambs-to-the-slaughter fashion to a cross (appropriately) that was strategically placed right smack dab on top of the stage to suggest this actually was Mount Calvary. They might as well have given me fifteen lashes on the way up. If you didn't sign the 'agreement' and tack it onto the cross, it would have been unheard of. So here we marched, year after year, signed our names in blood (it seems) to keep a personal contract with Jesus that I would resolve to abstain from inserting my junk into another junk until I'm able to like a girl enough to combine my credit score and mortgage payments from the moment thereof. They made you feel dirty for these natural feelings that were inherently within you that made you want to fornicate with any girl that dare show an ankle and wore anything short of a potato sack. I'd liken it to a muslim seeing his bride without her hajib for the first time. "Holy FUCK, BOO. Is that an ear? Bring that shit to papa!"

I remember my friend, Susan telling me that during one of the many classes throughout the day at camp they’d ask the girls if any of them have had sex out of wedlock and to raise their hands if so. Surprisingly, certain girls that didn’t give a fuck thought it would be funny and still raised their hands—almost beamishly proud. I assume the counselors needed to know so that they could specifically say there names as they prayed to God for them, although it was more likely to narc to their parents. There was this one time I was sitting next to this girl I liked during the Sunday evening service and our arms were touching ever so subtlely. Before you could say 'kumbaya my Lord', my youth pastor charged in to the unimaginable atrocious spectacle, grabbed my bible, opened it up to the last page of Luke and the first page of John and said, "Let's keep Luke and John between you two." (I can imagine had he caught me banging her on the pew, he'd have MacGyver'ed a condom from the leather cover.)

Really, I'm obviously over it. I learned a lot. The majority of us first learned about beastiality from our youth pastor, after all. I went home that night, curious to see what sort of atrocity this was, so I looked it up on the net, and damn I didn’t know that kind of creepy, yet fascinatingly awkward shit ever existed. Surely I would have found out about it one day (non-experimentally, of course), but on my own terms on a day when I was al
ready jaded by the concept of sex and my penis wasn’t something to scorn and curse at on a daily basis for existing. I'm getting there though. Keep me in your prayers.