A matched set, this time about young women, birth control, and sex

The American Academy of Pediatrics has a plan.  To protect your daughter from . . . you, it wants all girls who could be sexually active (that means every girl 10 or older) to have her own personal stash of “Plan B,” aka “the morning after pill:

During Thanksgiving week the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its recommendation that “morning after” prescriptions be issued to adolescent girls as a matter of course, allowing them the false security of what has long been described by advocates as a “fire extinguisher” in their purse to counter at least some of the consequences of risky behavior. “There’s no good reason” why there should not be follow-through on the recommendation, the San Francisco Chronicle asserts.

This is a heinous idea at so many levels.  I freely concede that there are young women out there who have the profound misfortune to be the daughters of abusive or unloving parents.  But I’m willing to bet that most young women have parents who love them.  The AAP is taking a problem for a minority of young women and trying to create a disaster for the majority of young women.  This is a plan that alienates young women from those who care for them most deeply — their parents:

“Girls often need support in order to avoid coercive early sexual activity, and the support of parents and medical providers is critical to enabling them to make healthy decisions,” [Anna] Halpine [founder of the World Youth Alliance and CEO of the FEMM (Fertility Education and Medical Management) Foundation] observes. “Girls want to be loved, not just used, and being affirmed in their pursuit of education and long-term dreams is a necessary part of the empowerment of any girl. Happiness is not an illusion; there are concrete things that can be done to achieve it, and explaining that to our girls is our responsibility and obligation. As the hookup culture grows ever more pervasive, it is matched by rising rates of female depression. We need to take these indicators of our young women’s development seriously, and make sure that we provide them with clear messages that help them fulfill their potential and achieve their dreams.”

Yes.  Yes, and more yes.  The government doesn’t care about my daughter, but I do.  The government cares about masses and batches of people, and the more dependent on the government they are, the better.

The government doesn’t only have no interest in young people when it comes to their emotional needs, it also doesn’t care about their physical needs.  Hormones are powerful medicines.  Every woman knows that the pill can interfere with the basic biologic function of pregnancy.  Most women know that the pill can bloat them and make them moody.  A significant number of women know that the pill can make them vomit uncontrollably.  The pill is also a not-so-rare factor in blood clots and strokes.  This is powerful stuff.  Girls who need parental permission to get their ears pierced or their bodies tanned are going to be handed hormones in sufficient doses to mess with their body’s natural functions.  Why aren’t more people outraged?

I’m not done yet, though, because I promised you a matched set.  Here’s the match:

The elite University of California, Berkeley has seen a blow to its uber-serious reputation with a controversial article from a student boasting about her marathon campus sex sessions.

Nadia Cho’s detailed account was part of her weekly column in The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s independent, student-run newspaper.

Cho writes that she and an unnamed male student started their romp in Berkeley’s library, Main Stacks, the day before Thanksgiving, when the campus was ‘marvellously empty’.

[snip]

But other students were in the library studying while the two performed and more than one student walked by them in mid-act, Cho writes.

She and her partner then moved into one of Berkeley’s classrooms, as she graphically describes.

‘Sex isn’t always about c****** and having orgasms. Sometimes it’s for s**** and giggles,’ she writes.

It’s impossible to imagine Cho’s attitude in a world where parents preach a loving, caring morality and birth control pills and abortifacients aren’t handed out like candy.  Again, I know that not all parents are loving, caring or even moral, and I know that many young women have sex without birth control or rely on things other than the pill, but the fact is that Cho is the product of a society that’s saturated in sex untethered to love, morality, family, or even plain old decency.