Preaching to the Choir

With a little less than half of the U.S. self-identifying as Pro-Choice, it's easy for us to stick together.  When you're young, hip, sexy, and buying quinoa from Trader Joe's, it's even easier.  Sex and Choice are natural conversation points at parties.  Supporting Planned Parenthood is taken as a given.  Some of us may even blog for an intended audience already in agreement.  For people like us, there are rallying points like this great video:

Wesleyan University - "I Have Sex"

And this more cloying one:

Second City - For Those With Vaginas

But preaching to the choir only goes so far to effect actual change.  Eventually, we actually need to mobilize our fervent energy and bring our concerns and our message to the other side, to those who don't already agree with us, to those who are uncomfortable with our position.  Accordingly, today I performed my most futile of civic duties:  I wrote a letter to my Senator, ultra pro-life Saxby Chambliss (R - GA Douchebag).  Note how I pretended that "budget cuts" are really the issue at hand:

"Dear Senator Chambliss,

I am writing to express my concerns about measures currently under consideration regarding reproductive health.  In the ongoing Congressional debates on FY2011 budget cuts, you have voted to defund both the United Nations Population Fund and Planned Parenthood.  I ask that you reconsider your stance on these issues, and lend your support to these vital organizations.  I am one of your constituents, and a citizen concerned both with the nation’s growing deficit, as well as with the impact of unintended pregnancies both at home and worldwide.  I believe not only that these two causes are related, but that they are intricately and inextricably linked.

First, I urge you to vote in support of providing funding to the United Nations Population Fund.  This organization does not fund abortions, but rather provides desperately-needed access to family planning resources and education to millions of young women and men around the world.   In addition, the UNFPA also provides medical care to pregnant women in an effort to decrease the enormous number of maternal deaths and injuries that occur each day.  These measures, which allow women in the developing world to determine the size and spacing of their families, have proven their positive impact.  Nations with fewer unintended pregnancies, smaller family size, and fewer maternal deaths are more stable socially, economically, and politically.  Such improvements would spell positive changes for our global community.

Second, I ask that you support federal funding for Planned Parenthood, an organization which provides family planning and health services to millions of Americans.  The mission of Planned Parenthood is to prevent unwanted pregnancy, allowing women and girls to complete their educations and further their careers, and saving millions of dollars each year in Medicaid and Welfare costs.

I understand the severity of the nation’s current financial situation, but I firmly believe that cutting funding from family planning programs is not the way to save money.  I am sure that you have heard the saying that every dollar spent on family planning measures saves four down the road.  Thus, in this time of economic crisis, it would behoove us as citizens of Georgia, the United States, and the world to invest in women’s future and in fiscally-sound family planning measures.

Thank you."

Naturally, my letter is going to end up being ignored.  Actually, it's not even going to be ignored by Saxby Chambliss; it's going to be ignored by Saxby Chambliss' secretary's intern.  But I'm glad that I finally voiced my dissident opinion to someone who is supposed to be representing me.  And maybe a hundred such letters would be harder to ignore.

Happily, Planned Parenthood is safe for now, but the failure of H.R. 1 bought only about three weeks of time.  The threat of budget cuts is not going anywhere.  So I'm going to go all PSA on ya'll and beg you 1) To donate to Planned Parenthood, and 2) to write to your Senators and Representatives.  Feel free to copy and paste my letter, emend it, or ignore it and write your own.  If you give a shit about this cause, please tell someone.  And don't let me be that someone.  Make it someone who doesn't already know.

Embarrassing Moments in History: Joycelyn Elders

I firmly believe that the first step in bettering life both at home and abroad would be drastically lowering the rate of unintended and unwanted pregnancies, while simultaneously cultivating healthier attitudes about sex.  Thus, I blog.  Yet my views really aren't all that radical.  They sound basic and intuitive enough, and completely in line with Whole Foods-shopping, NPR-listening liberal ideas.  Yet in practice, in the real world, we are still far away from realizing these standards.  To emphasize this point, I'd like to tell a sad story from (recent) history.

In 1993, Joycelyn Elders, pediatric endocrinologist and expert in childhood sexual development, was appointed the 15th Surgeon General by Bill Clinton.  At that time, the teen pregnancy rate was 11.1%, HIV rates were on the rise, and accordingly, the nation turned to the new Surgeon General for insight and solutions. From the start, however, she was unpopular with conservatives and the Democratic Clinton administration alike, and incited controversy through her support of abortion rights, marijuana legalization, and distribution of contraception in high schools.    

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joycelyn_Elders

Unfortunately, Dr. Elders offended polite sensibilities one too many times when she suggested in December 1994 that masturbation be taught to students as a form of "safe sex," in order to prevent HIV infections and teenage pregnancies.  Her exact words on this topic were "I think that it is a part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught."  These comments fomented considerable  following day, she was sacked by Clinton, who stated that this most recent indecency was "the last straw."  This was approximately one year before he stuck a cigar into an intern's vagina.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/monica-lewinksys-drudge-anniversary_b28876

Claiming that "masturbation is bad" depends on what the definition of "is" is.

In 1996, following Dr. Elders' removal from office, the U.S. famously instituted a nation-wide program of "abstinence-only education," which invested $1.5 billion of taxpayer dollars in attempting to terrify American students out of having premarital sex.  Years later, the rate of pre-marital sex remains steady at 95%, teen pregnancy rates are back on the rise, and millions of American students are still being told not to touch themselves or anyone else in a "special way."

http://spendmoneyonline.net/2008/02/01/anti-masturbation-device-french-c1880/

Anti-masturbation device.  Sin-proof, Clinton-proof.

I myself was one of these students who came up in an abstinence-only sex education curriculum in Georgia.  The majority of our education consisted of horrifying images of STDs, greatly exaggerated statistics about the inefficiency of condoms, and exhortations to "resist peer pressure" - since, naturally, teenagers only want to have sex when pressured to do so by other teenagers, not because it actually feels good or is encouraged by millions of years of evolution.  Masturbation came up exactly once in the discussion, surrounded with plenty of Georgia-variety hellfire and brimstone.  

Given that realization of the futility of such programs has led to some budget cuts, however, I wondered if the Richmond County Board of Education had changed its stance on abstinence-only education.  Having found no relevant information online, I called the Richmond County School Board's office last week to inquire about its current sex education policies.  After the nice lady on the phone offered to transfer me, I was promptly disconnected.  Now, given my familiarity with this particular office, I attribute this carelessness to general ineptitude rather than to some kind of grand conspiracy.  Nevertheless, further inquiry revealed that Georgia is one of 27 states still required by law to focus primarily on abstinence in sex education, and that its abstinence-only-until-marriage programs received almost $10 million in 2009.

http://community.babycenter.com/post/a25578437/featured_debate_teen_pregnancy_and_religion

Georgia ranks 13th in the nation for teenage pregnancy.  Ooops.

In the nation with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world, we inexplicably still pretend that abstinence until marriage is somehow a realistic goal.  Abstinence without masturbation, however, is about as realistic as trying to get America to actually follow the guidelines of the Food Pyramid.  While the importance of contraceptives needs to be emphasized over and over again ad infinitum to middle and high schoolers, the safest place for teenage semen is still in a sock, and the most effective and comprehensive sex education programs should acknowledge that.  Alas, Joycelyn Elders' suggestion was, and still is, far ahead of its time.  This is because for much of the nation, the priority remains not decreasing the overall rate of teenage birth, but promoting some kind of unattainable, Old Testament standard of sexual purity of which even Sarah Palin's children fall short.  We can only hope that a few more decades of these results may change our attitudes.  

Until then, Joycelyn, our hats (and our panties) go off to you!