Honesty is no virtue when it comes to misleading women about sex, says drunk buddy Jesus.
If you need an operation and the doctor tells you that overall, seven-eighths of patients have a successful outcome, you might think that was a pretty good deal. But suppose the operation failed. While you’re in the recovery room, the doctor tells you, “Oh, by the way, for people like you, the operation only succeeds 30% of the time. But we’ll sell you the solution to the botched operation.� You’d be furious. You’d sue that doctor for malpractice if you didn’t punch him first.
Wow, if such behavior was going on, you’d think it would end up in the movie Sicko. Luckily, the only people who are stupid enough to believe that doctors push contraception to trick you into having sex so you’ll get pregnant so they can give you abortions that aren’t paid for by insurance, so they have to charge minimal prices and operate generally at a loss are people who, like Morse, appear to think that people really hate having sex and need heavy pressure to do it. It would be more fun to mock people like Morse who think that other people would love to quit having sex if doctors didn’t make them do it, if Morse and others like her didn’t basically have the President’s ear.
For the record, the proper analogy is a doctor who sells you cholesterol-lowering medication in hopes that she can avoid open-heart surgery later. That there are often occasions where the regime doesn’t work and surgery sadly becomes necessary doesn’t necessitate a ban on either the medication or the surgery. In fact, such a ban would be considered cruel, unless only women got clogged arteries and they got it by fucking.
Next lie:
Yet this is precisely the situation Congress supports by funding Planned Parenthood and its allies to provide “comprehensive sex education� in secondary schools.
This is no exaggeration. Look at contraceptive failure rates, using Planned Parenthood’s own data.
To prove this, she links to data from other sources. She admits that she uses other sources, but implies there’s some connection to Planned Parenthood when there’s not. Here’s the actual data. (Not that I’m arguing with the papers she cites, but she’s pulling a sleazy maneuver to invoke PP and then use other stats.) There’s two columns, one that constitutes “perfect use” and one that shows “typical use”, a distinction that Morse ignores because it blows her argument out of the water. Basically, typical use failure rates are extremely dependent, as you can imagine, on the education of the people using the method. Someone who has the kind of non-education on contraception that Morse promotes will have a higher typical use failure rate, for obvious reasons. If you’ve never had sex ed and don’t know how to put on a condom, you’re more likely to break it. If you’ve never been told that antibiotics decrease pill effectiveness or that you have to take it the same time every day, you’re more likely to use it wrong and get pregnant. Morse wants to separate kids from the information that gets them from the status of typical use rates to perfect use rates.
But first she’s going to imply that there’s a huge typical use failure rate that Planned Parenthood stands beside, which makes her a liar. Thankfully for this devout Christian, the 9th commandment states, “Thou shalt lie, cheat, or steal to prevent others from protecting their sexual health.”
Somewhere between 12% and 13% of all contracepting women experienced a pregnancy within a year. In other words, about seven-eighths of women use contraceptives successfully. Two of the most commonly used and widely promoted methods are oral contraceptives and the male condom. Of all women using the Pill for one year, somewhere around 8% will experience a pregnancy. Between 14% and 15% of women who use the condom will become pregnant within a year.
The way she states it kind of implies that condoms get you pregnant, which I suppose is the point. In an ideal anti-choice world, teenage girls would think that the only way to avoid pregnancy is to get as much sperm as possible near your cervix, which would minimize the dreadful possibility that girls and women are having sexual pleasure without suffering for it. But luckily I, unlike Morse, provide you the actual numbers from Planned Parenthood, with the very important disclaimer for that 8% and 15% she neglects to share.
“Typical Use”: refers to failure rates for women and men whose use is not consistent or always correct.
So for those of you thinking, “Well, I’ve used condoms or the pill for years and have never been pregnant,” you’re not crazy nor are you especially lucky. What you are is what Morse is trying to wipe out, a person who has consistent access to contraceptions and the knowledge of how to use them. Which puts you closer to the failure rates that she doesn’t share, which is .3% for the pill and 2% for condoms.
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%.
Morse has taught economics at Yale for 15 years, so she can’t really pretend to be so stupid as not to understand the concept that correlation doesn’t equal causation. She’s just lying her head off.
But when I checked her blog, I did see how she managed to think there’s a direct link between getting married and not getting pregnant.
The Three Stages Of A Man’s Life
Single
Married
Divorced
Ha ha! Women sure do suck, don’t they? No wonder Morse feels we women need to be tricked into getting STDs and getting pregnant, just to even out the sad fate of hypothetical men that don’t exist in real life. Problem with her implication that marriage dries up the hot, hot sex (and therefore the amount of pregnancy): Married people do it more.
Morse continues her litany of lying her head off to imply that correlation equals causation.
At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.
Over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using condoms, will be pregnant within a year. By contrast, the middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 6% chance of pregnancy after a year of condom use.
These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples.
Fascinating, isn’t it, that the more economic and social power women have, the more likely they are to have access to contraception, education to use it, and the ability to demand that their male partners comply with the use of it. Morse implies that the size of your mortgage payment somehow magically improves your contraception’s effectiveness, but no go. A 15-year-old girl who lives in poverty and with a boyfriend is probably one of the least powerful people imaginable. Such a person unlikely has the financial ability to leave, giving her exactly zero leverage to enforce perfect condom use if he determines that it will feel better tonight without a condom. Such a girl has the access to contraceptions and education that Morse wants, which is very little, meaning that even if she manages to get to Planned Parenthood and gets one month of pills, she might not have the time or money to go back next month for more, putting her into the category of women (not “contracepting” at all) that Morse wants her in.
So, obviously, the solution to the problem is to find a way to extend the privileges of middle class women to the poor and to teenage girls, right? Grasshopper, you don’t understand wingnut logic. The best way to fix the problems of poor education and poor access is to up the ante, denying even more education and access.
Planned Parenthood and its allies in the sex education business have had conniptions over federal funding for abstinence education. But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.
That “not fucking” works in the abstract doesn’t mean that abstinence-only education works. The whole “abstinence works” thing is a red herring, because the non-education she’s talking about is refusing to give information about contraceptions and STD prevention, in hopes people won’t use them. Which they hope ideally means “won’t use them while not fucking”, but in reality often means, “won’t use them while fucking”.
As for the teenage girl who is dependent on a boyfriend and can’t enforce consistent condom use, what does Morse think will happen if said girl hears that abstinence “works”? By fairy dust and wishful thinking, she’ll get less pregnant when she has sex anyway?
With contraception, we can absolutely predict that some sexual encounters will result in pregnancy. The young, the poor and the unmarried are the most likely to experience a contraceptive failure. For these groups, pregnancy is not a rare accident, but highly likely.
Okay, I should quit quoting her, but seriously, how can she write this? How can she just assume that it’s poverty, youth, and instability that causes the contraceptive failure directly, without examining why there’s a correlation?
Few things really confirm to me that we don’t live in a meritocracy than the fact that people who make braindead arguments like this teach at Yale. I think that’s really what gets me in the end.
By the way, in the papers she cites, (links here) the researchers agree with me that the high failure rates in some socioeconomic groups implies that the best way to address the problem of unwanted pregnancy is to extend the educational and access privileges of the middle class to the poor.
118 Responses to “Condoms get you pregnant and other “facts” from the Wingnutteria”
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Speaking of power and women, i love the irony of having a “Meet Phillipina Women” ad at the bottom of the post.
You are, of course, on the mark with this post. Having worked as a sexuality educator, and spent a fair amount of time researching the anti-sex movement in Minnesota, I’ve got to say that lies are all they have. Some of ‘em know it, but the ground troops are fools who believe the lies. And no amount of reason or fact will change their minds, because the lies reinforce their fairy tales.
Amanda,
I do sometimes wonder how you can bring yourself to read the gibberish written by the wing-nuts. It sends my blood pressure up just reading the snippets that you’ve posted without actually attempting to read the wholepost from the idiots.
You are to be honored and commended for your self sacrifice and you will be blessed by teh Good Dog/Goddess/Gaia/DiscoMouseBall/(insert name of supreme being of choice here) for your actions.
Ahem….
cuing Sharon to say something really stupid about us encouraging kids to fuck in 5…4…3…2…1….
wow. this is a great retort. i’ll have to read it again once i’ve finished my coffee.
monday morning and we’re off!
Oopsie, she kind of gave herself away with “contracepting” there. Wingnut asshole translation: Evil women who use any kind of birth control, ever, instead of allowing themselves to get knocked up whenever their Lord Husband so decrees. (And sometimes when he doesn’t.)
I don’t suppose she grasps that lesbianism is pretty much 100% effective in preventing accidental or unwanted pregnancy.
But, that would still involve women having sex for pleasure instead of babies.
Being a gay male also works pretty well for avoiding pregnancy.
Teaches Economics at Yale.
Just let that sit on your mind for a few moments.
Who’s the maroon? The wank who can throw figures in the air and use them to justify any number of arguments, or the wank who swallows the bullshit whole and gives them academic standing?
A great post. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the intial analogy of the doctor lying about the chances with the surgery. Your analogy is, of course, right on and makes sense.
I’m impressed with the wing-nuttery making everyone a conspirator in Morse’s argument. Doctors lie (about everything, apparently, because they like ignoring the obligations they have to their patients at all expenses); Planned Parenthood lies; unmarried women stop having sex once they get married.
Like Madame Furie, I’m going to have to drink some more coffee to reread this. My head is spinning.
Ah, yes, the wonderful belief that a young woman who isn’t even in a position to insist that the guy she’s living with use a condom will be able instead to convince him that they should share living quarters chastely.
My preferred method of contraception is polycystic ovaries (No ovulation for me! Though I’m on contraceptives for health reasons). But I guess it’s okay in their world, because Gawd is making me suffer?
This is so illogical I’m not even sure I can grasp what point she’s trying to make. Maybe she and I have different definitions of middle age, but in the world I live, your fertility declines in middle age, so of course pregnancy rates go down. That’s why I can’t make sense of her argument. Is she trying to say that being married and hitting the age of 40 or so automatically renders you a birth control success story, so you shouldn’t use contraception until then, or to slyly suggest that birth control is completely useless so you should just do without it because eventually your fertility will decline naturally? Or is she trying to argue that you just shouldn’t have sex until middle age?
I call shenannigans on this whole “Yale Economist” thing. She’s laying claim to being a current, serious Ivy League academic, which she is clearly not. According to Dr. Morse’s bio, she:
“joined the Hoover Institution as a research fellow in 1997…Morse received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester. She spent five years on the faculty at Yale University before coming to George Mason University in 1985. From 1985 to 1996, she was a research associate at the Center for Study of Public Choice and director of the Public Choice Outreach Program and the Diversity Studies Program at George Mason University. In 1996, Morse moved with her family to California, where she pursues her primary vocation as wife and mother, combined with an avocation of writing and lecturing. She now lives in San Marcos, California.”
So, she was only “on the faculty” at Yale right after she got her PHD, probably as some sort of adjunct/teaching assistant. She apparently did not manage to obtain tenure there, and it’s not clear that she was even in a tenure-track position at Yale. She moved on to George Mason, but that job doesn’t seem to have been tenure track either, but rather a low-level academic gig as a “research associate” with some eventual administrative responsibilities. Ultimately she went into public policy (Hoover Inst) and freelance “writing and lecturing” rather than obtaining a professorship.
Conclusion: She is not a professor, but by repeatedly laying claim to having “taught economics at Yale and Geoge Mason for 15 years” she’s giving the impression that she has much more serious academic creds. than she does. Not to say she’s lying, of course, but it’s definitely a bit of puffery.
Lying seems to be her thing, Nausicaa, so I wouldn’t put it past her.
Of course, in addition to abstinence, another 100% way to have sex without risk of pregnancy is for a man to have unprotected intercourse with a pregnant woman! But the wingers probably won’t mention that one either!
I want to know why all of these contraceptive stats put the Typical use effectiveness of Abstinence so high, when so few who intend to remain abstinent manage to do so.
If I recall my Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” episodes correctly, Planned Parenthood does in fact discuss abstinence, in addition to all the other strategies one can employ. I think the guy said abstinence is better than the rythm method, or the rythm method is effectively a kind of abstinence. Or something. Planned Parenthood is at least honest.
As for how Amanda can stand to read such crud, I believe it is a combination of her ciritcal, analytical approach forming a kind of defensive screen, and experience reading crud before having a desensitizing effect.
Believe it or not, I go to college with some people who are deeply devout. One is a bona fide fundie but without most of the crazy. These friends are deeply devout, anti-choice, but pseudo-feminist*, accepting of gays, atheists, other religions, and people who roll their eyes at Bible quotes and stuff like that. And I mean accepting, not just tolerant. They have mature views of sex. Basically, they just don’t talk about what they don’t feel like talking about. Two or three of these friends find slash fiction amusing, and laugh at my dirty jokes. And we all live in co-ed housing with no problems. Come the fall two of these will be my roomates (a boy and a girl) and our fourth mate is an avowed atheist and a feminist of Amanda’s level. Yet we’re all friends. Its a tragedy that such nosy godbags have to become the face of Christianity. Its not fair to people like my friends, who I think are better Christians than Morse and her ilk.
*by pseudo-feminist I mean they believe in equality of sexes genuinely, but believe that “feminazis” actually exist. I’m in the process of disabusing them of that notion.
I’m not exactly sure what she thinks the cohabiting teens will do instead of sex- play tiddlywinks? I don’t know how anyone can suggest long-term abstinence for people who are living together as a couple and (I suspect) sharing the same bed.
This lady is wacko. I’ve never understood why people think that if they just tell teenagers to not have sex, the won’t do it. When I was in high school my girlfriend & I were doing it ALL THE TIME. Almost every day. It took my dad about 15 seconds to show me how to use a condom. He said “You should wait until your married (he IS old school), but since you probably won’t, use these EVERY time.” Guess what, it made sense to us to use them, so we did.
Given how Morse twists the quoted statistics, are we all that surprised at her massaging of her educational background?
Falsus in uno, falsus in totus.
Twit.
The pro-abstinence crowd also never mentions that the possibility of rape renders even total abstinence less than 100% effective in avoiding pregnancy. But of course those folks don’t really make much of a distinction between rape and consensual sex anyway.
Because I have had adverse reactions to hormonal BC (still willingly took the risk and used EC when I thought I needed it though!), my husband and I used condoms from when we started dating right on through to when we decided to get pregnant. I would say our use was probably perfect since I was really, really concerned that I not get pregnant before I wanted to and I’m a total control freak. In those four years we had exactly one scare, that in the end I think was due to stress I was under that month rather than any kind of reproductive blooper - even though I went to 3 weeks late I never tested positive on any brand of pregnancy test. Spent a lot of money on pregnancy tests that month.
Wingnuts might assume that I was simply a typical barren dusty-wombed feminist being over 30 and all, but alas, when we started trying I got pregnant in 2 months. Pretty damned fertile.
Condoms work if you use them correctly.
Oh and about married people having more sex - yeah, duh, married and shacked-up people have more sex. There is a person living in your house with whom you had sex so frequently, successfully and without mind games that you decided to move in with them (not the only reason but definitely part of it, right?). You can get sex with them any time both of you are feeling up to it and you will not wonder what their attitude will be later, or whether they will call you or should you call them or how LONG should you wait to call them. The depth of your post-sex angst probably only extends to whether to nap or get up and make some food. These are the tough questions.
Before you get too upset about the fact that Morse got to teach at Yale, take a quick look at her “academic bio” here. It’s a patchwork of cobbled-together post-doc years, visiting scholarships, and “teaching posts” (ie as a lecturer or adjunct). In other words, she’s a failed academic who’s fallen onto the wingnut welfare wagon.
Morse is arguing not from her economic training, but from an ideological bent uncompromised by reason.
I’ve recently been reading articles and watching videos on “crisis pregnancy centers� that exist to trick women and girls into having babies they don’t want.
I found it interesting how few such centers offered any healthcare at all. Most of them appeared to be nothing more than propaganda offices equipped with store-bought pregnancy tests and the occasional ultrasound machine. None of them, it seems, was equipped to deal with the needs of women who remained pregnant. (But the doctors who contract with or support Planned Parenthood – they are the liars.)
So too with Morse, who is content to sling half-truths in the service of her personal agenda without once considering how her tactics will affect those ‘poor girls’ she’s so concerned about helping.
Education on how to use prophylactics (etc.) is the best way to prevent abortion. Well, that, and sponsorship of community initiatives designed to raise the educational levels and economic status of “cohabiting teenagers.�
I repeat (for people even wing-nuttier than myself): abstinence education does not work. The best way to prevent abortion is to prevent pregnancy through good sex education and easy access to contraceptives.
//Contracepting is not a word!
Morse is arguing not from her economic training, but from an ideological bent uncompromised by reason.
Well, of course. But she brings to the table her authority as someone trained to be reasonable, which is misleading, since she’s not reasonable.
So . . . there’s no serious medical procedure that only has a 30% chance of success?
Funny, here I thought that some cancer cases or serious injuries had potential surgical problems where an operation had a low chance of success, but people took it ‘cause it was their best option, had a chance of improving their life, was better than suffering the original condition untreated. This isn’t the case? *innocent, clueless blink*
Where the hell are they getting this “people like you” analogy? Does she think some high-school guys have super-sperm that punches right through the condom? Or is it dependent on the assumptions of incorrect use by the students? In which case, I think the real-sex-ed programs have that fairly well covered, what with the condom-on-banana demonstrations that the abstinence people have been bleating about on and off.
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%.
How on earth can she claim that marriage increases the effectiveness of the Pill?? If this were condom usage, it would make more sense, because a boyfriend who is willing and able to marry a willing and able girlfriend usually indicate a couple with more responsibility and mutual respect.
But the PILL?
Could she have simply combined the “kicked him out” and “married” stats to make the magic wedding ring appear and grant “not ready to get pregnant” wishes? I’m also guessing that she doesn’t separate “kicked boyfriend out but is still dating him” from “kicked boyfriend out and won’t return his phone calls” in those stats, also.
This single argument alone–and her inability to recognize it as “not making any sense”–pegged my bullshit meter. Now I have to get a new one.
MAJeff, the God of Biscuits,
Well, I’m trying to be as inclusive as I can when I ask for blessings. But since there are purportedly 9 billion names of Dog, I figure to list a few of the better known then let the rest plug in whatever works for them. :})
Kyra,
You’re using logic, a concept that is utterly foreign to most of the wing-nut brigades. They choose to be willfully obtuse or ignorant in order to protect their delicate sensibillities from any corrupting influences.
The only thing I can say is those unfortunate people who think Morse’s position at Yale is sufficient to bolster her silly claims should be better trained to spot fallacious arguments.
In other words, you won’t get any argument from me.
How many teenagers (13-18) live with their lovers instead of their parents?
Anti-abortion zealots never explain — nor are called upon to do so by the vicariously pious media — how a girl or woman who can be financially squeezed out of having an abortion can magically afford a healthy pregnancy or to raise a child.
No-choice deadbeats like to claim that subjecting impoverished women to repeat visits, waiting periods, and a dead-end obstacle course of frauds enables a “second choice”, but the clear intent (besides the cruel power trip of shaming someone in a vulnerable state) is the flinty financial squeeze.
Sorry, Amanda, but she brings to the table her authority as someone trained in economics, which is a long way away from being trained to be reasonable.
(As an economist in training, I am allowed to make this joke.)
My favorite quote was “If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%.” Why? Because grammatically speaking it says that if this girl has no sex (because if she kicked out her boyfriend, he’s probably not having sex with her!), she still has a one in eight chance of getting pregnant! The little “or” clause does not change the actual meaning unless you are trying to be deliberately obtuse.
From her resume it’s clear she was postdocing and perhaps an adjunct. The good news is that people in those positions don’t have much (if any) influence over the curriculum - typically you teach more or less straight from the textbook, with only minimal room for creativity.
Few things really confirm to me that we don’t live in a meritocracy than the fact that people who make braindead arguments like this teach at Yale. I think that’s really what gets me in the end.
Heh. Even if it is true, as others have pointed out, that she’s not really a Yale prof, this still made me think of the time a friend of mine realized that all Harvard government majors have to take a class with Harvey “Manliness” Mansfield. She remarked, “Huh. I guess that’s what they mean by institutionalized sexism.” Luckily he probably doesn’t do any of the grading (a lot of classes, especially ones that are required for popular majors like gov, leave all the grading to TFs). But still.
I get “Are you the world’s best mom? Take the parenting style quiz” advert with a cartoon image of two women together with a baby between them, which I actually recognise from ‘Queerstock”, a source of photos and images of LGBT folk in a pro-LGBT way (ie rationality and reality).
And what is up with the accompanying photo of the woman holding the DVD and the creepy caption under it?
Kim Grivakis holds a copy of a DVD at her home in Lynwood, Ill., Friday, April 13, 2007, that she says she received in the mail anonymously which allegedly shows the principal and a teacher at the Sandridge Elementary School in Lynwood having sex in the principal’s office. Grivakis is the mother of a 13-year-old girl and 11-year-old boy who attend the school. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
I notice this has nothing at all to do with the column. At least not in any way my relatively sane mind can discover.
Weird wingnuts.
So, you think kindergarten-age children should be encouraged to have group sex, do you? How about with animals? You wouldn’t have a problem with that, right, since it’s the inevitable result of your “anything goes” approach to so-called sex-ed?
Morse received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester.
Oh, god, that diploma just keeps looking worse all the time.
Meanwhile, I’m still trying to wrap my head around how contraceptive use increases the likelihood that a teenage girl’s live-in boyfriend will get her pregnant… It’s no use. We speak different languages that happen to share many of the same words.
Well, dontcha know, wedding bands emit the same hormones as birth control. That’s why married people have such a hard time getting pregnant.
The most amazing thing is that she cites statistics that practically stand up and yell into a bullhorn, More education about proper contraceptive use is crucial to reducing unwanted pregnancies among poor teenagers!
And somehow palms it off as making the opposite point.
“How many teenagers (13-18) live with their lovers instead of their parents?”
I’m guessing there are two possibilities here. The study classified people 17-19 as teenagers (which they technically are), or the study did in fact have a certain percentage of women under 18 who were cohabiting. The main possibility I can think of for that is young women from very unstable homes who left ASAP to live with someone, anyone slightly less insane than what they were dealing with at home. Which indicates a whole nother level of powerlessness.
In the “technically” sense, I was once a cohabiting teenager, as I moved in with my college boyfriend second semester of Freshman year, when I was still just a babe of 18, and continued living with him till I was 21. And I have to say that in hindsight, even with probably the best of all possible contraception situations, I am shocked that I didn’t face an accidental pregnancy at some point. I can only chalk it up to our preference for oral.
Oral Sex ™: The Only Form Of Contraception That Actually Works For Teenagers!
The only thing I can say is those unfortunate people who think Morse’s position at Yale is sufficient to bolster her silly claims should be better trained to spot fallacious arguments.
Absolutely. That people buy into such evident bullshit is just further proof that there’s a serious lack of basic training in reason and logic in this country.
Oh and another factoid that might explain the reason cohabiting teenagers showed up as anything more than a blip in the study:
If this data was collected via Planned Parenthood or other free/sliding scale women’s health clinics, the fact that such clinics often provide free or virtually free care (including contraceptives) to women under 18 may be a factor, increasing the overall size of the teenaged patient pool and thus upping the likelihood that teenagers who cohabit would be patients. As well as the fact that women under 20 are less likely to have health insurance indepently of their parents, and that women under 20 are more likely to have a regular doctor who knows their parents, thus choosing even in the best of circumstances to go to a free women’s health clinic rather than their own pediatrician or gynecologist.
I know it was a common thing for girlfriends of mine who thought they might be pregnant and didn’t want their parents to find out to visit PP in a neighborhing town rather than just ask their doctors about it. And I know women who still feel this way past their 18th birthdays.
So I’d bet that your average sliding scale women’s health clinic (PP affiliated or not) has a higher than usual number of teenaged and 18-21 patients.
The whole lion pictures thing deserves its own study in visual rhetoric. I mean, how many men bare their teeth during sex? OK - some
, but the pic suggests violence to the female lion, which apparently gets this woman off. I won’t go on, but sheesh. What. a. scary. freak.
As an aside, I would be careful about the class (and gender) implications of calling adjuncts “failed academics.” In economics it might be more true, but in the humanities, adjuncts are usually trailing spouse (guess which gender usually gets the t.t. job, although it’s changing), place-bound (i.e. caregiving someoone or has spouse [usually husband] as primary breadwinner outside of academia), or parents with young children, who choose to avoid the tenure track. Sometimes it is because a person failed to publish enough or does not have the correct pedigree (another whole issue), but to call them failed is a tiny bit troublesome.
I read her references to “poor cohabiting teenagers” as racial codewords for young black and brown women, whom the wingnuts feel deserve to be chastisted and browbeaten whenever they get pregnant, whether their pregnancies were wanted or not.
I contrast that middle-aged married white women, whom the wingnuts also cannot leave alone without forever pestering them to have more children.
It all looks like a steaming pile of white-supremacist race anxiety to me. More typical conservative handwringing as they whine, “But if white women keep going to college and getting jobs, the brown people will outbreed us! Oh Noes!”
It seems the boiled down argument from the article is:
people with less education using contraception are more likely to become pregnant, so we should stop educating people about contraception.
Yeah, I know you already said it but I like short.
Between 14% and 15% of women who use the condom will become pregnant within a year.
I’m sure it would be much lower if HE used the condom.
Am I the only one here who sees the term “cohabiting teen” and sees a whole whole whole lot more problems than unprotected sex? Like, access to prescriptions on a monthly basis? Like poverty and coercion?
The only time I knew of teenagers living together, it was more like “banding together in some multi-room shithole so they could barely survive on Burger King wages”. If pregnancy happens in such situations, it is a failure of parental and social support, not birth control per se!
I want to know why all of these contraceptive stats put the Typical use effectiveness of Abstinence so high, when so few who intend to remain abstinent manage to do so.
Yeah, shouldn’t abstinence have an ideal effectiveness of 100% and a typical use effectiveness of about 10%?
Yep. Abstinence. Why is the typical stat 100% ?
If the ‘typical use’ stats include people who forget condoms/skip pills, why not collect stats on people who forgot to be abstinent or are not correctly abstinent? Lets be consistent with data collection, shall we.
MJ - that’s exactly what I was going to say. Does anyone know the “typical use” effectiveness stats for abstinence? I’m guessing 30% or so.
I’ve seen stats for single incidents of sexual activity (unprotected) leading to pregnancy quoted as 1 in 20 to 1 in 4. So, assuming a single ‘failure’ of abstinence leading to sexual intercourse, once a year, the typical failure rate for abstinence would be 5-25%.The typical effectiveness would be theoretically 75-95 %. With a higher number of failure ‘incidents’, the rate per year would increase. Though an actual survey of users of this method would be more informative than theoretical calculations.
I think the numbers above are intellectually honest, considering that a user of the pill may forget one pill a year and not be considered a ‘perfect’ user. On the other hand, I do tend to periodically rethink whether abstinence is actually a method of birth control or a way to avoid the use of birth control.
rate per year for typical failure would increase, that is.
It’s not just on the blogs. They actually teach us that crap in school. (I am in Texas.) But ….. don’t tell anyone ….. some of the health teachers use the old textbooks and teach us real facts.
I don’t listen to anyone’s rantings on how others should conduct their personal lives until they answer a few choice questions about their own. Hooked up to a lie detector machine. When I tell them I’ll be glad to listen to their advice after I have determined how much they have followed it and how it has worked out for them, they are usually quiet and often leave.
“If you’ve never been told that antibiotics decrease pill effectiveness or that you have to take it the same time every day, you’re more likely to use it wrong and get pregnant.”
Just so you’ll know, recent research has indicated that antibiotics DO NOT decrease birth control efficacy, with two exceptions, both of which are used to treat tuberculosis. Current medical guidance tells providers to let their patients know that they no longer need to worry about using a backup method when taking antibiotics unless they are experiencing vomiting and/or diarrhea, both of which will interfere with the absorption of the hormones into the system. Vomiting for obvious reasons, and diarrhea because of the fact that the vast majority of absorption takes place in the intestines, and diarrhea will cause the hormones to pass through the system before they can be absorbed.
Sources:
http://www.myfilebin.com/userfiles/caitlain/oc-abx_final_9-8.pdf
Contraceptive Technology, 18th Edition, published in 2004.
Yep. Abstinence. Why is the typical stat 100% ?
Norons will believe that people who pledge to be “abstinent” are not people, but robots, and “I shall abstain from sex” is a prime directive. Which should be the first thing everyone understand about abstinence education, namely that it functions off of faulty and ludicrous premises.
Frick n frackin’! “Norons” = “Morons”
Nothip - Female Lions very clearly enjoy sex. If you’ve ever seen video of them, there is absolutely no doubt that they are having a very good time indeed. Dirty little sluts. Then they get knocked up and go on welfare and the poor Male lion has to pay cub support.
Between 14% and 15% of women who use the condom will become pregnant within a year.
Hmm. Call me crazy, but that still seems better than the 85% pregnancy rate of no contraception. Even the “over 70%” statistic she uses for cohabitating teens using condoms is better than 85%. SO, even according to her own figures, using condoms is better than nothing.
*Blink**Blink**Blink*
How did this person get a PhD in anything and not be able to understand statistics? I don’t care that her academic career didn’t take off- plenty of very smart people wind up trapped in the adjunct pool- but some school, some committee of academics actually awarded her a PhD!
Her argument is just so stupid, I’m stunned.
Oh holy crap! I read the entire column, and I thank god that this woman will never be in charge of my child’s sex education. I’m going to be that weird mom who answers her child’s sex questions with stratight answers.
I’m her worst nightmare, because my kids will go out in the world and tell other kids the straight poop on contraception and disease prevention. After all, Jesus doesn’t want your children to know about the “naughty” parts of their body and how they work, or how to keep them disease-free.
Oh holy crap! I read the entire column, and I thank god that this woman will never be in charge of my child’s sex education. I’m going to be that weird mom who answers her child’s sex questions with straight answers.
I’m her worst nightmare, because my kids will go out in the world and tell other kids the straight poop on contraception and disease prevention. After all, Jesus doesn’t want your children to know about the “naughty” parts of their body and how they work, or how to keep them disease-free.
You know, unless you’re raped. But then you must have been asking for it, so that pregnancy is your just desserts.
[…] hat tip, Amanda […]
It’s worse than that, togolosh.
The male sticks around doing nothing until it’s time to hunt, and then he usually gets to be the ambusher of whatever prey the lady lions drive towards him, so then he does his few minutes of work and then serves as the maitre ‘d to keep away hyenas, jackals, etc.
It doesn’t happen too often, BTW:
I’m fairly certain this isn’t what Morse is talking about, however there is a much higher rate of pill failure if you are not thin. I think it is something that really needs to be talked about more.
http://www.bigfatblog.com/node/872
so for someone who is pro-abstinence, that sure is a sexualized picture of single male life. ROAR I am in charge and powerful and always pinning down the lionnesses for sex, because, ya know, I’m single. Or maybe the whole point is that she doesn’t hate women, but men (and by extension, of course, sex) so that the picture of the lion skin is the ideal.
Moral: marry men (it will keep you safely from conceiving), yell at them, and take them for all they are worth.
economics indeed.
I read her references to “poor cohabiting teenagers� as racial codewords for young black and brown women
Why?
Maybe this is my privelege showing, but why would one hear those words and immediately think non-white?
The majority of Americans living below the povery line are white.
There are obviously teenagers in all racial groups, and I don’t think the fucked up family situations that would be likely to result in a woman under 18 cohabiting with a lover are limited along racial lines. I knew plenty of white kids growing up who left home in high school because of abuse, financial issues, general instability, etc.
There are also a lot of definitions of “teenagers” (as previously stated, some surveys call anyone under 20 a teenager), a lot of definitions of “cohabiting”, and a lot of reasons someone might leave home at a young age. I haven’t lived with my parents since I was 16, and I have spent roughly one of the 10 years since I left home not cohabiting in some way with males I may or may not have had sexual relationships with. I would have been “poor” for all of those 10 years except maybe the last year and a half or so. And yet I’m white.
Actually, I thought the animal under the lion in the first picture is an antelope.
i.e., there are girls you marry and girls you screw, and they are not the same. How could that muscled and filled-out lioness ever compare to the dainty, graceful antelope the lion had to chase down and pin?
Now that I look at the picture more closely, though, I see that it is in fact another lion.
Was. Was an antelope. I went back and modified my first sentence after taking a second look at the series of photos.
Her conclusions are indeed bizarre, but she’s not making up numbers out of nowhere, she used this study: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3105699.pdf
Which does indeed show that women who are cohabitating but not married have a considerably higher chance of getting pregnant than women who are either married or not cohabitating (but obviously still having sex).
No, that’s not a violent thing at all, I don’t think. Look, his eyes are squinched shut and his mouth is wide open…that’s a lion orgasm-face if I’ve ever seen one. Which I haven’t, so take this comment with all necessary grains of salt.
I find I rarely want to make on-topic comments on Pandagon, since all the other sensible people here get there before I do. However, I have wondered before what the “typical use” stats for abstinence are…anyone know? I couldn’t hunt them down last time I tried. Maybe people won’t admit to having been trying to be abstinent once they get pregnant, unwilling to say “Well I wasn’t going to have sex but ended up getting carried away in the moment” the way they might say “The condom broke” or “I was on the Pill but got pregnant anyhow”. Typical denialism, that would be.
The only thing I can say is those unfortunate people who think Morse’s position at Yale is sufficient to bolster her silly claims should be better trained to spot fallacious arguments.
of course a position at Yale isn’t proof of rational ability. it’s a position at YALE.
/Harvard
I would not defend Jennifer Roback Morse, but I would defend the photos.
Sorry, Ms. Marcotte - as someone who never has and never will have any first-hand experience as a married male, you cannot comprehend the accuracy of the “lion” photos you’ve published. It happens more often than you’d like to admit.
“Which does indeed show that women who are cohabitating but not married have a considerably higher chance of getting pregnant than women who are either married or not cohabitating (but obviously still having sex).”
Which has to do with what, exactly?
To repeat:
Correlation is not the same as causation.
Being unmarried does not cause you to be pregnant. There are a great many reasons for the survey to show those numbers. One that I can think of is that cohabiting women may be more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies, so they may not already have a relationship with a regular OBGYN and instead rely on a clinic like PP, which if I understand correctly, is the kind of facility where the data was collected. Cohabiting couples are also likely to be younger, with a higher fertility rate, less life experience, and a higher likelihood of abstinence-only sex ed.
Nobody here is arguing that Morse invented the data, just that she’s using it disingenuously and drawing bad conclusions from it.
I want to know why all of these contraceptive stats put the Typical use effectiveness of Abstinence so high, when so few who intend to remain abstinent manage to do so.
Come on now. In the wingnut experience, staying abstinent is as easy as breathing. Even for the ones who don’t actually want to be abstinent.
I’ll take these in order if that’s okay, opoponax.
First, the majority of Americans living in poverty are white because white people make up the majority of the American population. Something on the order of 70 percent. African-Americans comprise about 15 percent of the population, yet are about 30 percent of Americans living in poverty. Just like in the correctional system, minorities in poverty are overrepresented in proportion to their representation in the general population.
I agree that teenagers come from all racial groups, and I too moved in with a lover when I was a teenager (before I graduated from high school). However, the percentage of white teens who enter into living arrangements with people other than their parents is a function of class, which is directly impacted by and socially constructed in similar ways as race. By specifically counting teenagers in these unusual living situations as though they are the norm, Morse is deliberately skewing her sample to get the results she wants to write about. Shorter Morse: Living in sin leads to lots of unintended pregnancies, no matter what kind of birth control is being used.
I too, am white, left home when I was a teenager, and spent about ten years cohabiting with a male who I was having a sexual relationship with. Now that I’m middle-aged, affluent and married, I remember just how difficult and inconvenient it was for me to arrange to get access to reliable contraception and reproductive health services. Were it not for my having lived in an urban area and owned a car, I am pretty sure I would have experienced some unintended pregnancies too.
The point I was making is that Morse’s article is entirely too judgment-based to be accepted as the result of a dispassionate scientific inquiry. She’s more concerned about scolding economically disadvantaged women (especially younger women) than in reporting on the effectiveness of contraceptives.
Sorry, Ms. Marcotte - as someone who never has and never will have any first-hand experience as a married male, you cannot comprehend the accuracy of the “lion� photos you’ve published. It happens more often than you’d like to admit.
Because you’ve failed to keep your wife’s interests—perhaps it was a mistake to quit being romantic just because you’re married?—doesn’t mean all men have your problem. Again, the statistics tell another story. Married people fuck more. Sorry, that’s just the facts.
Nor do I really care, since I’m not married. You make it sound like I have some sort of self-interest in denying the facts. In all honesty, not married and not gonna get married. So, it matters not one bit to me if the wedding ring kills the libido.
roses, there’s more detail in the actual study article that explains why these socioeconomic factors were used — they’re a proxy for actual behaviors, as explained in this disclaimer:
In other words, getting married won’t change your behaviors, but certain behaviors typically congregate around certain socioeconomic factors. Correlation, not causation.
This is on the first page of the study. I guess Jennifer Roback Morse didn’t get that far, just to the results summary nearer the top of page 1:
Shorter Mucky Fingers:
Damn bitches.
Sorry, Ms. Marcotte - as someone who never has and never will have any first-hand experience as a married male, you cannot comprehend the accuracy of the “lion� photos you’ve published. It happens more often than you’d like to admit.
Where I come from, women just love that condescending, entitled sneer in a man. Gets them all sticky. Maybe you’re married to the wrong woman.
I read her references to “poor cohabiting teenagers� as racial codewords for young black and brown women, whom the wingnuts feel deserve to be chastisted and browbeaten whenever they get pregnant, whether their pregnancies were wanted or not.
I contrast that middle-aged married white women, whom the wingnuts also cannot leave alone without forever pestering them to have more children.
I tend to agree, especially in light of the paragraph that precedes the statistical breakdown:
But these statistics, while technically correct, don’t tell the whole story, not by a long shot. These are the “overall� statistics that our hypothetical doctor used in our opening story. The “for people like you� statistics paint a very different picture.These studies break down the population into age groups, income levels, marital status and race.
and afterwards:
These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The “overall failure rates� are simply not relevant to this target population.
Now, aside from the odd Clarence Thomas, I’m pretty sure that Townhall’s readership (”people like you”) is mostly white. So yeah, in addition to the anti-sex thing, this also seems to be another installment in the “oh no, promiscuous black moms are spurting babies all over the place!” series, topped off with the dire-sounding — hell, totally conspiratorial — “Planned Parenthood is pushing its failed techniques on this very group!” On purpose, no doubt, in order to either outbreed white people or ramp up the number of abortions.
Maybe this is my privelege showing, but why would one hear those words and immediately think non-white?
The majority of Americans living below the povery line are white.
Statistics are meaningless to wingnuts: it’s all about the labels and the code words. Once a group is labeled, it’s then deemed Good or Bad, and the thought processes can then go back to sleep — the lizard brain’s autopilot takes over. Poor Teenager is Welfare Queen’s cousin; both are probably Bad Single Mothers, and, in the mind of the average Republican, Poor Teenager is just as black as Welfare Queen. (Anyway, white people aren’t poor, they’re honest, God-fearin’ working class folks! Poor people live across the tracks. And they’re lazy.)
the opoponax:
Because in wingnutteria, “poor” is always code for “brown.” It’s been that way for almost 30 years, now.
Don’t confuse the silly people with reality. You’re just going to give them seizures.
And drunk buddy Jesus may be a sinner, but at least he’s a proper Semite, not some blue-eyed Nordic god straight out of Valhalla.
Dan, you bring up an excellent point there. Can’t believe I had never thought of that.
The lion pictures were just too much. The way the Family Values crowd goes around proclaiming their love for marriage, while sluring women, boggles my mind. The cognative dissonance is just too much for me. Here is my blog response:
http://nekoonna.blogspot.com/
Oh, and MuckyFingers- I’ve never been a married male before, but I am a married female, and I say the pictures are crap. There are at LEAST as many women who find themselves in unhappy marriages, followed by soul-destroying divorces- this is not the sole purview of males.
Why does anyone listen to Jennifer Roback Morse?
Dr. Morse had plenty of sex before she was married, lived a child free life while getting her PhD, and finally had one kid in her thirties.
However, she advocates abstinence, early marriage, no birth control, and lots of babies. It’s “do as I say, not as I did”.
Why does anyone listen to her?
As for the lions, given her past, this is probably what Jennifer Roback Morse really thinks, but defending wingnuttery pays better.
“Why does anyone listen to Jennifer Roback Morse?
Dr. Morse had plenty of sex before she was married, lived a child free life while getting her PhD, and finally had one kid in her thirties.
However, she advocates abstinence, early marriage, no birth control, and lots of babies. It’s “do as I say, not as I did�.
Why does anyone listen to her?”
Because she’s a clone of Dr. Laura? A potent catalyst for creating guilt in the self-hating? A perfect encapsulation of the hypocritical Right? A living and breathing example of moral-trolling wingnutty double-think? Another Serena Joy as we enter Gilead?…
Flying Fox, I’ve met people like your friends and I believe they exist. I wish they had more of an influence within their own denominations, or that they were willing to publicly disagree with the bigotry being passed off as their religion. Good luck to you.
It is a well-known fact that the consumption of whole grains, vegetables, tiny brunch sandwiches, and drinks with umbrellas in them (traditional fare of the upper middle class) thickens the vaginal mucus of wealthy women, forming a spermicidal barrier with which condoms can only hope to compete. This barrier further strengthens naturally with age and, because of the production of the marriage-induced hormone “blisstosterone,” with marriage.
Thus, the ideal contraceptive solution for the low-income unmarried woman is to marry a rich man, boosting her natural disinclination to pregnancy with a very serious one-two punch.
For the poor without an eligible upper-class man handy, resolving never to fuck will do nicely; however, studies show a baffling lack of cooperation from the poor in this regard.
“By specifically counting teenagers in these unusual living situations as though they are the norm, Morse is deliberately skewing her sample to get the results she wants to write about. Shorter Morse: Living in sin leads to lots of unintended pregnancies, no matter what kind of birth control is being used.”
Oh, you have no argument from me there. Again, I just didn’t read “poor cohabiting teenagers” as necessarily non-white. Probably because I was once a poor cohabiting white teenager, and I knew other poor cohabiting white teenagers, and it just didn’t seem to be a function of race at all but of class, and also of particular circumstances that may or may not be connected with class at all (I also grew up middle class, though I’m more aware that I was in the minority there).
“Now that I’m middle-aged, affluent and married, I remember just how difficult and inconvenient it was for me to arrange to get access to reliable contraception and reproductive health services. Were it not for my having lived in an urban area and owned a car, I am pretty sure I would have experienced some unintended pregnancies too.”
No argument there, either. Just having the benefit of 8 years and a college degree has been a huge difference.
“The point I was making is that Morse’s article is entirely too judgment-based to be accepted as the result of a dispassionate scientific inquiry. She’s more concerned about scolding economically disadvantaged women (especially younger women) than in reporting on the effectiveness of contraceptives.”
TOTALLY! Again, I think we see 100% eye to eye. I just didn’t read that particular phrase as being code for “non-white”, in the way that, say, “urban” tends to be.
“Because in wingnutteria, “poorâ€? is always code for “brown.â€? It’s been that way for almost 30 years, now.”
Clearly you’re not over-familiar with the expression “White trash”.
Though Cizungu explained it very well — every once in a while I let myself forget about that whole “ooooh nooo, brown people and their functional ovaries!!!!!!” meme.
I cannot believe someone defended the lion pictures as saying anything about human relationships. I wanted to quip that the divorced lion is clearly dead because he didn’t have a female to hunt for him– because that is how lions operate. Females hunt, successful males laze around except to chase away other males, and as was noted above, sometimes help bring down the really heavy prey animals once they’ve been chased to him.
If you do want to make an analogy, I guess Mr. Lion is the stay-at-home parent, who, after divorce, has to re-enter the workforce with a big gap in his resume… which would make him analogous to a suddenly divorced stay-at-home mom, not the wage-earner.
But when I checked her blog, I did see how she managed to think there’s a direct link between getting married and not getting pregnant.
But… The purpose of marriage is to create children, which is why we can’t let the homos marry without “destroying the institution of marriage”. So, does this mean we need to ban marriage in order to save it?
Jeebus, is everyone else who refers to Ms. Marcotte as “Ms. Marcotte” a misogynist creep? I’m going to have to start calling her Hierarch Marcotte, or something.
And I’ve gotta second (or third, or whatever) Cizungu’s analysis of the racial undertones. Repeated unwed pregnancies from white girls don’t create quite the same hysteria, because if nothing else it might have made it possible for Chief Justice Roberts to get his
Hummel figurinesblond children domestically. There’s a reason why “white trash” needs the “white” modifier when discussing poverty in Morse’s circles.Samantha, because other species, ones we’re not even closely related to, tell us so much about ourselves.
//sarcasm? dry delivery?
(I just posted because I wanted to add a title to my name. All the cool kids have one; I’m just a wannabe.)
“But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.” How does she account for the Virgin Mary getting pregnant?
A couple of decades ago, some Maryland wingnuts were arguing that we shoudn’t teach condom use because they have a 7% failure rate. I wanted to tell them that the result of their policy would be, for every 7 women who get pregnant under the program they oppose, they’d make 100 women pregnant; therefore, they’d see a 100% failure rate.
I’ve got no time to properly read the comments, but just knowing this woman’s credentials are in “economics” is pretty much a red flag for me.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure a lot of good folks get credentialed in Ec in order to do some good. But as a “science” mainstream academic economics is right up there with phrenology and the reading of entrails.
Actually as someone with some neopagan leanings I’d go with the entrail-reading diviner before letting myself be mystified by marginalist arguments.
I hate having been kept too busy to keep up with threads this weekend; I’m sure earning my pay, but they don’t up it any for that…
If you need an operation and the doctor tells you that overall, seven-eighths of patients have a successful outcome
If you need an operation, then there’s not really much to talk about. You’re pretty much getting the operation and hoping for the best. On top of that, anyone who’s studied more than 2 minutes of Bayesian statistics (which someone with her background should have) could tell you that doctors are terrible at determining probabilities like “what is the probability that the patient will die from this operation given that they are 25 years old?” Most of the time, doctors are not only wrong, but way off the mark because they don’t understand the basics of conditional probability.
Those same probability methods would also tell you (using the PP data) that partners who use the pill and condoms perfectly have an extraordinarily low rate of pregnancy.
abstinence is only 100% effective in a “perfect use” scenario. improper, i.e. “typical” use of abstinence actually produces a very high failure rate. in fact, every single instance of unwanted pregnancy resulting from the lack of contraception is caused by “typical abstinence” (i.e. not being abstinent). get it?
Hey, I am a Christian and I do belive its good to teach abstinence, however I also have an IQ over the two digit mark and believe contraception is something we need. It’s my opinion that most people are stupid ( I dont mean to insult anyone here, I just mean in general )and when we are young we tend to be stupid a lot, so abstinence at a young age seems right to me since your knowledge of most things is less when you are young duh, however when you come of age and start learning and getting ready for a sex life, then you need to be educated so you can protect yourself. This to me seems obvious but somehow a lot of people dont get it ( hence, i believe most people are idiots ). And as another person commented, people like her make Christians look bad, hey God may have some pretty stern rules but he is also understanding and hey if he didnt love us he wouldnt have made sex so good. So if you want to follow the letter of the law then abstain but if you dont, dont be stupid, God still wants you to protect yourself and remember, the best gift God gave us is free will, he may have set rules, but he still wants us to choose, so go out there get educated and make a good choice. God bless you all, if you dont believe then that ok too just have a great day!
Abstinence does work either. Mary got pregnant. Nothing is save. Nothing.
[…] Sex Education Amanda has a post talking about this article . She does a pretty good job of things, so I’ll just do the short version of the article’s argument: […]
What a big fat lying saq of road apples! Is the human race this retarded they’re still pushing religious-orientated governing-control on each other?
C’mon people, this 2007 AD! Wake up!
This is a great write-up, Amanda. Thank you much!
I’m sending this out there as we speak.
This is the most sense a photo of mine has been ever attached to. Thank you Amanda for an great exposé of one of the biggest lies ever foisted on the USA.
Now, now, Ms. Morse has a valid point! This kind of stance can have an impact in other fields, such as weight management, as well! The people over at Weight Watchers are controlling our schools’ health information, and they’re getting fatter. In fact, weight management information has increased in schools over the decades while our kids are ballooning! The only way to battle this epidemic is to not eat at all. When you never eat, you have a 0% chance of gaining weight. IT WORKS EVERY TIME!
Last time I checked, parents have the right to opt their children out of public school sex ed programs in every state of our union.
Someone should tell Jennifer.
Funny thing about male lions - given the opportunity, they kill the cubs. All of them.
Hey, I am a Christian and I do belive its good to teach abstinence, however I also have an IQ over the two digit mark and believe contraception is something we need.
Then this isn’t about you. It’s about “abstinence-only education” and the witless panty-sniffers who believe in it.
Sorry, Ms. Marcotte - as someone who never has and never will have any first-hand experience as a married male, you cannot comprehend the accuracy of the “lion� photos you’ve published. It happens more often than you’d like to admit.
Damn you gays and feminists, with your marriage-pushing agenda!
Sex without marriage is bad for women; sex without marriage is bad for women; sex without marriage is bad for women
Marriage is bad for men ..
WHAT??
Interesting how she goes on the topic that would appear that marriage is the most important thing, and then has a show of lions like that demoting marriage (Well for the male anyways). . These people have the worst skewed logic I have ever seen!
[…] Condoms get you pregnant and other “factsâ€? from the Wingnutteria […]
It’s interesting that the US government’s position seems to be to encourage pregnancy - at least, that was the impression I got from reading this. I live in the UK, and started taking the Pill a few months ago. When I saw my doctor about it, I asked about the various other methods, such as contraceptive injections and implants, that prevent pregnancy over a longer period of time (the former lasts 8-12 weeks, the latter lasts 3 years). She told me that the government encourages the use of longer term methods such as these, and encourages doctors to prescribe them when possible. This is especially the case in poorer, worse educated areas, where the assumption appears to be that women won’t remember to take a Pill or won’t use contraception correctly. By essentially making them sterile for up to three years, the government is then able to bring down our astronomically high teen pregnancy rate - I think one of the highest, if not the highest, in Western Europe. It certainly seems to show that they have no faith in abstinence only sex education. I have to say this was the first time I’d considered just how much of a role the government’s agenda can play in the well being of an individual.
If Abstinence only is so great, why do most European countries, with a more liberal attitude toward sexuality and few if any Abstinence only education, have much lower rates of teen pregnancy and abortion than the US does?
Also, how is an Abstinence only education going to stop a 15 year old girl from being taken advantage of?
It should also be noted that poor people, regardless of the country they’re in, tend to have more babies. And with fewer economic opportunities, they are more likely to end up in prison or on welfare. And, of course, those on the right are against welfare for the poor. Apparently they want the poor to have more babies with less government money to pay for them. Apparently they want us to go back to days of Dickens..
Birth control, it should be noted, costs much less than sending more people to jail are have them be on welfare.
Hm. I’m a lion, and as such, I’m struck by a sexist message in the pictures that may have gone unnoticed by the humans at Pandagon. The lioness in the first (single) picture is slim and cute, while the lioness in the second (married) picture is clearly fat and probably pregnant. I guess that she’s been “ruined” now and he should walk away? The bitch got pregnant and now she’s making it hard for him to leave? Something like that?