I guess I should introduce myself. Hi. I’m trailer park, a 26-year-old (former teenage) mom living in Austin, TX with my eight-year-old abstinence-only baby and my husband of three years who (shockingly) didn’t mind that his bride wasn’t a virgin. I’ve been online for years, but I only started my little public blog a few months ago, and I’m thrilled to be guest-blogging at Feministe for a week. And now, with that out of the way…
Jennifer Roback Morse must be crazy:
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.
Wow, who knew that wedding rings worked as a contraceptive? It’s as if quality education and access to health care have nothing at all to do with one’s ability to use contraception effectively.
These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The “overall failure rates” are simply not relevant to this target population.
Planned Parenthood and its allies in the sex education business have had conniptions over federal funding for abstinence education. But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.
Poor people just shouldn’t have sex! That’s the ticket! It’s not like poor people need anything fun or pleasurable in their lives, right? Sex is not a natural, normal part of human pair-bonding, it’s a luxury like champagne and caviar!
God, who do these people think they’re fooling? Even before the sexual revolution, 90% of Americans had premarital sex. Poor, young, single people are NOT going to stop having sex, and raising the risks of sex only leads to tragedy:
Three times in the last eight years, investigators have fished the body of a newborn from a lonely stretch of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, haunting detectives and residents in the area.
This week authorities announced a horrifying development: Two of the three children likely came from the same mother.
The nearest abortion clinic to Red Wing, MN is an hour away, and the only Planned Parenthood clinic in town is open two days a week. There are, however, dozens of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the area. If lack of access to abortion and birth control forces the young and the poor to remain abstinent, just how did those three dead babies wind up in the river?
Resnick said the typical profile of a mother who commits neonaticide was a 19-year-old young woman, often unmarried, who may still live with her parents, and may not be able to face her parents’ disappointment — both that she’s had premarital sex and that she’s become pregnant.
“Some may feel that they will literally be rejected from the house,” he said.
Resnick, who treated a woman who killed two of her newborn children, said that such fears can become so overwhelming that the mother completely loses sight of what she is doing. He points to the remarkably difficult circumstances under which neonaticides often take place.
“These women deliver alone, without pain relief, and without crying out, for fear of discovery. Oftentimes the parents are in a different room in the house. Then [the mothers] manage to wipe up all the blood, dispose of the baby and do all of this unaided. In that sense, you can see how the women are so much more terrified of discovery than they are of actually taking a human life.”
So much for the idea that slut-shaming creates a “culture of life.”
hat tip, Amanda
cross-posted