Like many politically minded people of all parties, I have also been watching the progress of the Human Embryology Bill. Believing as I do in autonomous liberation, I have thus far refrained from commenting (one cannot put of revision forever). That said, I cannot help bringing up something which has been heard a lot as this Bill has progressed through the parliamentary process. It is a basic untruth which does an enormous amount of harm to everyone’s reproductive rights, and not just those of women. It is that young women treat abortion as: “just another form of contraception.”
This lie is one which is constantly spouted by the anti-choice lobby. It assumes that couples simply don’t bother taking precautions during sex because “hey, if something goes wrong, you can just get rid of it right?” This assumption is an insult to those millions of women who need to take a difficult decision under what almost certainly aren’t circumstances of their choice. At least consider those women who don’t even have a choice about having sex. If I were to be devoid of all humanity, I’d go so far as to say that abortions don’t even sound that convenient, (what with the 2 signatures and the jumping though hoops to prove need…), I’m not a women so I don’t know, but I’d assume that taking a pill daily, or using a condom is far more efficient and infinitely less stressful.
But abortion isn’t the issue I want to discuss. The issue with me is the root of the ridiculous statement above. The Daily Mail and other tabloid newspapers, so keen to support the 20 week limit, are also very keen on publishing stories on ‘Britain’s record teen pregnancy’. Said tabloids are also very fond of expressing ‘moral’ outrage whenever plans are revealed for sex education in schools. It’s usually some utter rubbish, suggesting that telling pupils about sex will ‘only encourage them to be promiscuous’. This conclusion is usually based on the faulty logic that if one, for example, hears a beautiful piece of music; one will want to learn to play for oneself. The suggestion is that it is obviously the same with learning about sex.
Usually the letters will flood in from indignant parents (‘My daughter is only 14, she’s far to young to learn about sex’, etc, ad nauseam). Always the conclusion is the same; better sex education = promiscuous teenagers = higher teen pregnancy rates.
Firstly, this conclusion is utterly incorrect. In fact, it is so absurd I can assume most of our readers are intelligent enough not to need it pointed out to them. Secondly, levels of sex education in this country are appalling.
Now admittedly I’m only speaking from anecdotal evidence, but quite often that is scary enough to suggest that something needs to change. Personally through my schooling, the standard from a biological point of view was quite good, even if parents were allowed to remove their children from the class for those lessons (‘well we can’t have our child actually learning anything’), at least we were told the mechanics. For the social side of things we were kept mostly in the dark with no time officially allocated for teaching, and no specialists. In fact, I’m told our old headmaster actually prevented the school nurse from supplying free condoms (“teenage boys actually having sex?? Not my pupils!”).
That said, I’m quite sure I got the better part of the deal. While I went to a middle class suburban comprehensive (though this came with problems of its own), inner city schools are obviously in a much worse state for sex ed, not even having adequate resources to spare on it. All manner of myths surround sex when you are a teenager, no matter how much the ‘moral’ right would like to keep us in the dark. What bothers me is not that young people won’t know anything about sex, its that they won’t be in possession of the facts or the accurate information. When you hear a 16 year old girl (physically kept by her parents from knowing or learning anything about sex) ask if it’s possible to get pregnant from oral sex, you have to ask if we as a country are doing enough through education.
Supposedly ‘moral’ parents (often the hardcore conservative Christian variety in my experience, but one doesn’t like to generalize) would love to stop their children being taught any of the facts of life –presumably under the misguided impression that what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Yes it will. You aren’t keeping them innocent, you’re keeping them vulnerable. After all, would you avoid teaching them about road safety, because it might tempt them to cross the road? Basic health and safety in the workplace anyone? No, anyone who falls off a ladder obviously had it coming to them.
The point I’m trying to make is that, chances are, a girl who knows how contraception works, where to get it from and how to use it, is probably less likely to end up needing an abortion than a girl who believes (or is led to believe) that you ‘can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up with your socks on when it’s a full moon’. That is why I despise the right wing lobby that is both anti-choice and anti-sex-ed. Call me cynical, but it seems to me that if this lobby really believed in ‘the rights of the unborn’, it would surely give full support to a decent and fully funded program of compulsory sex education in all UK schools and thereby help to reduce the number of unplanned and accidental pregnancies.
This lie is one which is constantly spouted by the anti-choice lobby. It assumes that couples simply don’t bother taking precautions during sex because “hey, if something goes wrong, you can just get rid of it right?” This assumption is an insult to those millions of women who need to take a difficult decision under what almost certainly aren’t circumstances of their choice. At least consider those women who don’t even have a choice about having sex. If I were to be devoid of all humanity, I’d go so far as to say that abortions don’t even sound that convenient, (what with the 2 signatures and the jumping though hoops to prove need…), I’m not a women so I don’t know, but I’d assume that taking a pill daily, or using a condom is far more efficient and infinitely less stressful.
But abortion isn’t the issue I want to discuss. The issue with me is the root of the ridiculous statement above. The Daily Mail and other tabloid newspapers, so keen to support the 20 week limit, are also very keen on publishing stories on ‘Britain’s record teen pregnancy’. Said tabloids are also very fond of expressing ‘moral’ outrage whenever plans are revealed for sex education in schools. It’s usually some utter rubbish, suggesting that telling pupils about sex will ‘only encourage them to be promiscuous’. This conclusion is usually based on the faulty logic that if one, for example, hears a beautiful piece of music; one will want to learn to play for oneself. The suggestion is that it is obviously the same with learning about sex.
Usually the letters will flood in from indignant parents (‘My daughter is only 14, she’s far to young to learn about sex’, etc, ad nauseam). Always the conclusion is the same; better sex education = promiscuous teenagers = higher teen pregnancy rates.
Firstly, this conclusion is utterly incorrect. In fact, it is so absurd I can assume most of our readers are intelligent enough not to need it pointed out to them. Secondly, levels of sex education in this country are appalling.
Now admittedly I’m only speaking from anecdotal evidence, but quite often that is scary enough to suggest that something needs to change. Personally through my schooling, the standard from a biological point of view was quite good, even if parents were allowed to remove their children from the class for those lessons (‘well we can’t have our child actually learning anything’), at least we were told the mechanics. For the social side of things we were kept mostly in the dark with no time officially allocated for teaching, and no specialists. In fact, I’m told our old headmaster actually prevented the school nurse from supplying free condoms (“teenage boys actually having sex?? Not my pupils!”).
That said, I’m quite sure I got the better part of the deal. While I went to a middle class suburban comprehensive (though this came with problems of its own), inner city schools are obviously in a much worse state for sex ed, not even having adequate resources to spare on it. All manner of myths surround sex when you are a teenager, no matter how much the ‘moral’ right would like to keep us in the dark. What bothers me is not that young people won’t know anything about sex, its that they won’t be in possession of the facts or the accurate information. When you hear a 16 year old girl (physically kept by her parents from knowing or learning anything about sex) ask if it’s possible to get pregnant from oral sex, you have to ask if we as a country are doing enough through education.
Supposedly ‘moral’ parents (often the hardcore conservative Christian variety in my experience, but one doesn’t like to generalize) would love to stop their children being taught any of the facts of life –presumably under the misguided impression that what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Yes it will. You aren’t keeping them innocent, you’re keeping them vulnerable. After all, would you avoid teaching them about road safety, because it might tempt them to cross the road? Basic health and safety in the workplace anyone? No, anyone who falls off a ladder obviously had it coming to them.
The point I’m trying to make is that, chances are, a girl who knows how contraception works, where to get it from and how to use it, is probably less likely to end up needing an abortion than a girl who believes (or is led to believe) that you ‘can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up with your socks on when it’s a full moon’. That is why I despise the right wing lobby that is both anti-choice and anti-sex-ed. Call me cynical, but it seems to me that if this lobby really believed in ‘the rights of the unborn’, it would surely give full support to a decent and fully funded program of compulsory sex education in all UK schools and thereby help to reduce the number of unplanned and accidental pregnancies.
No comments:
Post a Comment