Some three weeks have passed since the Supreme Court dumped Roe v. Wade and the torrent of angry pro-abortion-rights pieces fills the pages of nearly every news publication out there.
Outlets like the New Yorker, for instance, just keep pumping them out at a rate that you have to wonder when they turned into the public voice of Planned Parenthood. The editors are, of course, preaching to their choir of faithful readers.
I’ll also say that the anti-abortion folks have been totally unprepared for the never-ending waves of attacks and, yes, some of the lies that have followed the ruling. I’m seeing precious few of their opinions out there in the secular media. Maybe they’re being blocked; hard to tell.
The underlying assumption of the argument is the gospel of the Sexual Revolution — people have a right to sex whenever, however, wherever and with whomever. This right is a modern invention. Most societies attempted to chaperone their teens and encouraged their offspring married young. They also punished adultery quite severely. One’s ‘right’ to sex was hedged in enormously.
Today, the thought of limiting one’s desires is equal to an obscenity in our culture, which is why the antidote to abortion –- abstinence -– draws such howls of protest. How dare anyone tell us no? And so an Religion News Service led a story on abstinence with these paragraphs:
(RNS) — In front of a room of middle schoolers, a youth minister in rural North Carolina scribbles “hand-holding” and “kissing” on the bottom of a whiteboard. He then writes “intercourse” on the top of the board. Between the gap, he draws a thick line, indicating that sex before marriage — anything more than kissing, actually — crosses a literal line of purity.
It’s a scene the Rev. Amelia Fulbright, now the transitional pastor of the Congregational Church of Austin, recalls from her childhood, when she attended a ministry-led sex-ed course.
The reporter chose someone from a liberal denomination, or responded to a a PR message from that church, to arrive at this inevitable conclusion.
Sadly, religious groups aren’t the greatest when teaching about abstinence I will admit, but to stack the argument so early in the article is unfair.
As abortion bans fall into place around the country, there is likely to be a renewed focus on teen pregnancies and, with it, fresh battle lines drawn in a decades-old debate over how best to teach young people about sex: an abstinence-only approach or what is often called “comprehensive sex ed.”
For her part, Fulbright is an advocate for comprehensive sex education, which covers a range of issues relating to the physical, biological, emotional and social aspects of sexuality, including gender identity, various sexual orientations and contraceptives.
“I don’t think it’s possible to make a sound biblical case against abortion or comprehensive sex ed,” said Fulbright. “Bodily autonomy, personal conscience and dignity are a big part of my Christian faith.”
This is, of course, one side of the debate that is (supposedly) the subject of this news report. And there is no rejoinder challenging this kind of statement about abortion? Actually, the Bible has plenty to say on the personhood of the unborn. There are many voices available to discuss that in a wide range of religious traditions.
The story did offer one alternate argument, as seen here:
Lori Kuykendall, CEO of Beacon Health Education Resources in the North Texas suburb of Irving, said she believes abstinence-focused education, sometimes called “optimal health” or “risk-avoidance” curriculum, has a positive, holistic effect on students.
“Abortion is a decision after several other decisions have been made,” said Kuykendall. …
Abstinence education, she argues, helps young people make choices far ahead of those they would face with an unintended pregnancy.
“We’re farther upstream in a more proactive approach to help young people not get to that point.”
In other words, if you don’t attend that high school kegger (which is what they were called when I was young), you won’t get drunk in the first place which tends to lead to other things. That was the motive back then to get kids into sports; the logic was to keep ‘em too busy to waste time on the wrong kind of parties.
Well, expect more attacks on abstinence, already the whipping boy in this short-circuited journalism debate.
No one seems to think that teens CAN choose not to have sex; it is thought that the urge is too strong for anyone to realistically resist. The idea of saying “no” to sex feels like the ultimate blasphemy toward this age of being all you can be. Thus, there really isn’t a need for journalists to explore the kinds of traditional religious believers — again, in various faiths — who are rebels against the dominant culture.
Covering both sides of that debate would be interesting, to say the least. Why not try it?
Other coverage out there includes this New York Post piece about women threatening a #sexstrike out of anger over the Court’s ruling. A sample:
Big Apple abortion protesters were in support of a sex strike Saturday — as “abstinence” started trending on Twitter in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“If you’re a man who won’t get a vasectomy, even though it’s reversible, and you’re not out in the streets fighting for my rights, you do not deserve to have sex with me,” Brianna Campbell, a 24-year-old EMT, told The Post.
You do wonder when so many journalists flushed critical thinking down the toilet on this issue.
Has anyone tried to dig up studies showing that abstinence education can be effective? They are out there, although getting teens to report their sexual behaviors in detail to anyone sounds pretty challenging. Not sure researchers are lining up to do that.
Vox carried this one-sided piece on sex education post-Roe that linked abortion restrictions with all the current bogeymen:
Many of the educators I spoke with see the assault on abortion access as part of a much broader, long-term strategy geared toward consolidating white male power. That strategy also includes anti-trans legislation, book bans, and efforts to do away with medically accurate sex education, said Michelle Slaybaugh, a former school sex educator who directs social impact and communications at SIECUS, a nonprofit comprehensive sex ed advocacy organization.
Had to get that “white male power” thing in there even though two of the six justices were not white men. What such an article doesn’t understand is that some folks fear sex education in public schools for a reason — it often doesn’t stay within the boundaries of the birds and the bees. It seeps into something else entirely, as American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher noted in this very opinionated blog piece: “Democrats: Party Of Child Mutilators & Kidnappers.”
Read this Portland Mercury piece about fights happening in Oregon public schools over the state’s sex-ed curriculum (it’s not objective or balanced, but it’s all that I found out there) and parents’ unwillingness to have trans ideology taught to their children.
About the other Portland (in Maine), read this 2017 piece from the Press Herald. Note the lead paragraph reads how staff are required to be “taking the student’s side at school if there is disagreement with a parent’s wishes.” I put part of one sentence in italics for a reason. Schools may shy away from pro-abstinence classes, but some educators are willing to go to the mat in terms of sabotaging parents on the trans issue.
Wonder why parents started pulling their kids out of public schools and enrollments are way down in many parts of the nation (think New York City)? It’s not just due to COVID-19, folks.
Once again, readers can expect abstinence and sex ed to become to become new front lines in the culture wars over how to help kids to want or not want abortions in the first place. Expect abstinence to be given one or two paragraphs -– if that -– to present its case with 20-to-30 paragraphs leaning the other way, for such is the way of it in today’s media.
Again, this is a journalism issue. I wish those covering this would at least consider listening to those who believe that abstinence has worked over the millennia. People tend to die more from sexual license than sexual lack and the reason that the world’s great monotheistic religious pushed it is because sex within boundaries actually works.
Don’t think I’ll see that in a headline anytime soon, will I?
FIRST IMAGE: Art drawn from the Equality, Justice, Woman website in Turkey.