And another

[trinityvixen]

Here's some actual news: the next time you hear something that sounds like an urban legend with the names/places changed, assume it is one. I'm looking at you Time Magazine.

Most of the people who read my journal are smart. You are, so give yourselves a hand. And the majority of you are very young indeed. Meaning that most of you are not so far removed from high school that you have forgotten how tough it was. Meaning that if you heard someone say that girls at a high school got together and formed a clandestine pact to get themselves pregnant on purpose, you'd laugh harder than you did at the person who believed the sperm-on-the-cheek-swab story was true for a friend's classmate. I think I was that person, actually, and even I'm not dumb enough to buy the bullshit about teenaged girls forming a coven of sperm-seeking mommy wannabes.

Especially not when the principal who "reported" this "pact" to the "press" points to one person in any sort of authority to back him up and that person says that his pearl-clutching media moment was the first that she'd heard of it. His only other sources are anonymous, uncited folk talking in hallways. Because hallways have never been known to distort facts. Facts being factually reported have never lost accuracy as the message moved from one mouth to one ear and back in crowded, noisy places. Apparently, neither this principal nor the ace reporter has ever played a game of Telephone in their entire lives. I'd pity them, but they're smearing teenage girls' names in the mud, and if the resignations over the principal's refusal to allow the nurse's office to stock contraceptives is any indication, he's fixing to do worse.

It's the set-them-up, knock-them-down strategy in one fell swoop. He denies them contraceptives, the sex-ed is nonexistant, the girls get knocked up because HELLO THEY ARE ONLY HUMAN BEINGS AND THEY ARE PULSING WITH HORMONES, and he gets to pretend they did it on purpose because they should have known better (how if school won't teach them?) and they could have protected themselves (without knowing how? without access to means?) but they didn't, so obviously they chose pregnancy (they're not human? they're not fallible? they don't forget? they always use the contraceptives they don't have perfectly accurately?).

And his bullshit, not the corrected story (i.e. that he is full of shit) is what will be used as a weapon against girls and women having control over their bodies. Well done, you magnificent asshole.

Comments

[negativeq.livejournal.com]

And another comment -

When I was in graduate school, some of my colleagues became pregnant. Intentional or accidental, they never said. Another colleague made the remark that the pregnancies MUST be intentional because nowadays with all of the options available, no woman should get pregnant by accident. This person felt that if a woman has unprotected sex, then it was because deep down, or perhaps subconsciously, she wants that baby.

I don't buy that. There are several reasons why a woman might choose to have unprotected sex, and none of them good. She may have been in the heat of the moment. She may have been pressured. The birth control is too annoying. She might be that religious. Or perhaps she DID use BC, and something went wrong. That can happen too from product defect or improper use. No BC is 100% effective.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This is the problem with moral scolds: they do not allow for human error. They have managed to refrain from potentially dangerous behavior and they therefore assume that everyone should be able to (and want to!). Then, if they can't and human error comes into it, well, human error apparently ceases to exist once you get to it past the "you're engaged in naughty stuff anyway, that was the real mistake." No one uses contraception 100% effectively without experience. Experience is hard to come by when people are withholding information (or the contraceptives themselves, as some pharmacists are doing when they refuse to prescribe to unmarried women).