Trump Admin. Has New Trick To Get Kids Knocked Up: Abstinence-Only Sex Ed!
It's notoriously very effective for that.
For the past few years, conservatives, particularly those in this administration, have made it clear that they are not very pleased with the overall decline in teen motherhood. Hell, Mississippi, Idaho and Kansas actually went so far as to sue the FDA over their rules change for mailing abortion medication on the grounds that they did not see the “expected” rise in teen pregnancy after Roe was overturned.
Teen pregnancies have been steadily decreasing over the last three decades, due in very large part to the adoption of comprehensive sex education in schools across America. This decline is also the primary cause of the population decline that Republicans have been so het up about. So, unsurprisingly, this administration is looking to increase those rates by the most effective means possible — abstinence-only sex education.
The administration is pulling federal funding from fact-based, comprehensive sex education programs for supposedly violating their new criteria for the 16-year-old, $100 million Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. What is this new criteria you ask?
Via New York Times:
The new criteria say that grant recipients must teach abstinence as the only means to prevent teen pregnancy. Courses must stress the importance of marriage and procreation and instruct young people how to safeguard their fertility. They make scant reference to preventing sexually transmitted infections and virtually none to lesbian, gay and transgender sexuality.
But wait, it gets weirder!
Applicants must provide separate modules on male and female reproductive health. Young women should recognize “ovulation as the central event and primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility.” Although gynecologists often prescribe birth control pills to treat irregular cycles and extreme menstrual pain, courses must include “an overview of approaches to managing menstrual health concerns, including the advantages and disadvantages of ovarian suppression.”
When actual medical professionals talk about “ovarian suppression,” they are talking about the practice of reducing estrogen production in the ovaries, usually for the purpose of treating breast cancer. Here, it’s obviously a way to make hormonal birth control sound scary and unnatural. Right-wing internet trolls have been extremely committed, over the last few years, to spreading the word that birth control makes women “crazy,” and trying to get women to get off of it, and start using the notoriously ineffective rhythm method instead.
Tracking menstrual cycles in this way is also a big part of their equally ineffective “alternative” to mainstream fertility treatments. Indeed, the scientifically ridiculous “restorative reproductive medicine” promoted by those who think IVF treatments are murder will be taught in these classes.
But what about the boys? What will they be told?
Glad you asked!
Body literacy courses for boys should include strategies for managing “spontaneous arousal in ways that support self-regulation, health and future fertility.” And they should address “how repeated or artificially stimulated arousal may affect neural development and behavior over time.”
Yeah. They will teach boys not to masturbate. Given the scientific rigor at work here, we can probably assume this will entail eating a lot of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and graham crackers. Boys will also be taught about the importance of testosterone, because this administration is weirdly obsessed with testosterone.
Several organizations that teach comprehensive sex-ed in the states that allow it (all but 14) have already had their funding pulled. So where is that funding going to go? Well, one option, it seems, are “crisis pregnancy centers.” You know, the places that pretend to be abortion clinics, so that when women come in to have one, they can talk them out of it or employ various tactics designed to keep them in limbo in hopes of tricking them into waiting too long to have one.
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We know what works when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy: comprehensive sex-education (and smartphones). They don’t want to do what works. They want to do what pleases the Heritage Foundation and weird right-wing internet trolls who think they know better than medical professionals. They want teens to get pregnant because not only do they want to increase the birthrate, they also want people to get married at younger ages, as the weird internet trolls they represent believe that this will result in a more even distribution of women. Plus, if you get them knocked up real fast, maybe they won’t go to college or have a career of their own, causing them to stay in marriages they don’t want to be in for financial reasons. Isn’t that fun?
I am telling you, a very big part of the weirdness we are seeing among young men as it pertains to love and dating is rooted in purity culture and the insane abstinence-only classes many of them were exposed to as teenagers. The whole thing where they’re obsessed with the idea that a woman’s “body count” lowers her intrinsic value or makes it more difficult to “pair bond” with them is just another iteration of the pro-abstinence exercise where they pass a piece of chewed gum around the class in order to demonstrate how it ends up losing its stickiness, or the one where they pass a rose around to show how it loses its petals, or the one where they all spit in a cup and then the teacher explains that no one wants to drink the gross spit cup, which of course represents the defiled person who has sex with more than one person in their lives. Not sure it’s that much less gross to drink a cup of one person’s spit, but whatever.
These new guidelines are not only going to result in more teen pregnancies, they’re also going to result in more misogyny down the road. But hey, that’s what this administration wants.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
There is a prevalent belief in the 'manosphere' that women somehow retain the DNA of every man they've ever had intercourse with, so therefore no man can ever really be sure if a child is his, regardless of how long he's been in a monogamous relationship. I wish I was joking, but they really are that stupid; and many of them are now working for Trump.
O/T:
Wow, Tesla stock is down right now 13.5% today. Google -6.6%. Amazon-4.3%. American Airlines -8.3%.
Oil is up about 6% though! When Biden was President, I could only get about $25 worth of gas into my car. Now with Trump, I can get $40 worth into the tank! MAGA!