Category Archives: Sex Education

Say It Isn’t So

October 29, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

As members of the human race, we look to our capacity for language to elevate our communication skills above all other members of the animal kingdom.  Civilizations are separated by archaeologists based on their languages and their ability to create sophisticated writing systems for recording the spoken word.

Creating words to say what we mean has inspired the thesaurus, where subtle connotations can dictate the use of one particular synonym to mean exactly what one wants to say.  Every fifth grade teacher has struggled to expand the vocabulary of budding writers.  How many times does a student use “pretty” in her story when “gorgeous, comely, lovely, ravishing, sightly or elegant” would paint a better picture?

Costume designers and actors can create ten different people who are “rude” based on the author’s choice of words.  He may be rude…but is he audacious, bold, brazen, cheeky, forward, impertinent, insolent, disdainful, nervy or sassy?

The sophistication of our language points to the premium we place on communication.  Whenever a relationship is deteriorating, the first place we look to is the couple’s ability to effectively communicate.  Almost seven million…six million nine hundred and fifty thousand, to be exact…links are reported by Google search engines looking for “improving communication in relationships.”

With so much emphasis on improving communication, it defies human intelligence to understand the logic behind the decision of the California legislature to retract language back to caveman status.  This month Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 777 into law.  When it takes effect it will prohibit any instruction or school-sponsored activity that would promote discrimination against gender. That means terms like “mom and dad” and “husband and wife” cannot be used in California textbooks because they suggest that heterosexuality is the norm.

“Suggest”…to hint, to imply…that heterosexuality is the norm…this is a bad thing?  If we are not to consider the particularity of our sex, then why does every form we fill out have two boxes for us to check…male…female.  One imagines “neutral” forms of the future where we instead will check either…human…or…other.

This restriction of communication comes at a particularly interesting time in human civilization.  More and more boxes have been added to the forms we fill out, an attempt to fully communicate whether we are Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Eskimo, Asian…or for lack of specific descriptors for our origins…Other.

This attention to diversity is required even for second graders and is a headache for every teacher who must help thirty seven-year-olds to properly record their ethnicity in less than an hour.  Librarians are guided by diversity to ensure that their choice of books includes stories for every ethnicity and representing cultures worldwide.

Now, suddenly and legally, under the terms of SB 777, diversity has become a bad thing.  No longer can children be exposed to women and men who are moms and dads inside of marriages where they committed to one another as husbands and wives.  And why?

Because this form of diversity is offensive to people who have chosen not to express their heterosexuality in traditional ways…people who describe themselves as homosexual, gay, lesbian and transgendered.  Depending on your choice of words, this conundrum is either puzzling, confusing, challenging, mysterious or problematic.

Even as we keep giving people more and more ways to describe themselves, we are taking away the ability of children to describe their moms and dads.  We are asking children to ignore the fact that their moms and dads are husbands and wives.

Do we think that by legislating language that children will fail to pick up on the heterosexual realities of the world they live in?  Do we think that requiring children to describe the adults in their homes as parent, parent or parent, will keep them from noticing their parents are of different sexes and wear wedding rings?

What has happened to the premium we place on honoring diversity?  Honoring different ways of living?  Honoring cultural values…even if they are the values of the very culture we live in?

With so many words to say what we mean, to describe the variety of life around us, what in the world has led us to make laws removing words from the dictionary for the very purpose of not saying what we know is true?  Dear Governor Arnold, if you can find the proper words…say it isn’t so.

Failure Is Assigned to Maine Students

October 22, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

If you’ve read the news, and if you’re not banging your head against the wall, you must be pulling out hairs…or at least scratching the scalp raw.  What were they thinking of?

Wednesday night, October 17, grown adults on the Portland School Committee in Maine voted to extend approval of condoms for junior high students to a wider approval of the full range of birth control options.  School-based health clinics will now be in the business of dispensing birth control to students ages 11 to 13…confidentially…without informing their parents.

This decision shows the muddled thinking of adults who, while loving children, have lost track of the best interests of children.  Richard Verrier, who supported the vote for birth control, told the Associated Press, “it’s not enough to depend on parents to protect their children because there may be students who can’t discuss things with their parents.”

Well, Mr. Verrier, it’s too bad the Portland School Committee failed to act as “caring parents” to “protect their children.”  Any loving parent will know that a child 11 to 13 is not old enough to engage in sexual activity of any kind.  A loving parent protecting their child would take every possible step to teach, counsel, mentor and direct their child away from sexual activity.

Instead, Portland School Committee members acted as rebuffed taxpayers who do not want to spend dollars on rearing babies born to children.  Even when the district provided condoms at their clinics they reported that 17 middle school students had become pregnant in the last four years, seven of them in the 2006-7 school year.

Responding to teen sex as a teen pregnancy issue, their emphasis on birth control tells students that having sex is not the problem.  Having babies is what the adults who “care about them” object to.

One must wonder at the factual information the Committee relied on to make their decision.  Firstly, teen sex is not just a problem when it creates babies.

Valerie Huber, Executive Director of the National Abstinence Education Association points out the obvious.  “Whenever an 11-year old is having sex, there is a problem much bigger than whether or not she will become pregnant because a child that young who has the opportunity to have sex – let alone feels she is mature enough to deal with the physical and emotional effects of intercourse – is, in most cases, seeking intimacy and approval because it is void on all other levels in her life.”

This search for love is what leads to teen pregnancy.  Engaging in the lives of teens, demonstrating true affection and love for their welfare, is a costly investment.  But it is what prevents teen pregnancy.  Instead of providing what teens really need, the Committee opted to throw pills and condoms at them.

They will be disappointed.  They will continue to witness teen births.  Given typical use, the overall failure rate for condoms in preventing pregnancy is approximately 15%.  For teens, this failure rate increases to 22%.  When you promote condoms to teens, you are promoting a 22% failure rate.

Likewise, chemical birth control has its own failure rates.  Dr. Patricia Sulak, a leading researcher of birth control, makes it a practice to ask her adult audiences to raise their hands if they or someone they know became pregnant while using the birth control pill.  With regularity, the room is filled with hands waving in the air.

Evaluating contraception failure rates for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), the Committee has now become a key causative factor in this epidemic.  Condoms, despite regular media hype, fail to prevent serious STD infections, including incurable genital herpes.  One in five people over the age of 12 now have genital herpes and carry the virus on body areas not covered by the condom.  Talk about failure!

And if you want to ensure failure, just give a pack of birth control pills or a patch to an eleven-year-old.  Reassured by adults she trusts that she is “protected” against pregnancy, what chance is there that she will also use condoms?  Chemical contraception offers absolutely NO protection against STDs.  Automatic failure!

Committee members will find themselves regretting their actions, even if it takes several years for them to see their error.  Not so for the teens who accept the Committee “solutions” for teen pregnancy.

These teens will begin reaping the “rewards” of failure right away.  They will experience the failures of the solutions promoted by adults who wanted a quick fix at the expense of teens who will be left to deal with the here and now failures of the quick fix.

Contraception will fail to safeguard our children.  And by leading our children to contraception, the Committee has failed our children.  A double dose of failure…and we will all pay the final price.

What It Means to Be a Woman

September 24, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

This year at Smith College, in the Connecticut River valley of western Massachusetts, according to their website, a “world-class faculty of scholars are fully engaged with their students’ intellectual development, and an open curriculum encourages each student to explore many fields of knowledge.”

At this nation’s largest college for women, 24 course offerings explore what it means to be a woman.  The “Seminar on Gender and Social Change” sums it all up:  students explore “the intersection of race, class and sexual orientation” as they are revealed in “case studies [to] include feminist, lesbian and gay, right-wing, self  help, anti-abortion, and pro-choice movements.”  In short, being a Smith kind of woman requires a motherly embrace of abortion.

Whether it is Smith College or Harvard or Columbia or any American university, young women…and men…are being taught that abortion is the ultimate feminist right that guarantees the ability of women to succeed in life.  If you are pro-woman, you are required to be pro-abortion.

Woe to any student who might enter college holding a reverence for life.  This is the kind of “mistaken notion” that will cause the ire and ridicule of professors to fall upon on her, doom her to Cs and lower on papers and deny her access to fellowships and faculty positions.  In most cases, these women will survive.  They will be converted.

Battered from every side, our college daughters will eventually come to believe that no self-respecting woman could ever claim to be pro-life.  In a curriculum closed to real academic inquiry, they will never hear the truth about Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wrote feminist papers opposing abortion and infanticide in The Revolution, a newspaper she published with Susan B. Anthony.

Neither are college professors likely to disclose Stanton’s letter to Julia Ward Howe, the creator of Mother’s Day, where she wrote, “When we consider that woman are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to dispose of as we see fit.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is not the only woman college professors choose to neglect.  Not surprisingly, their slate of “undesirables” includes all women who embrace the life-giving capacity inherent in the very nature of being a woman…Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Dorothy Day…and many others.  The curriculum at Smith College may be advertised as “open”, but not that open.

Luckily, college is not the only place where one can get an education.  Thanks to modern feminists who are reclaiming the definition of what it means to be a woman., it is possible to join the company of real feminists, both past and present, who affirm the value of every human life, no matter how small or humble it may be.

Like those who paved the way before them, Feminists for Life has refused to be controlled by the politics of abortion.  Believing in the strength of women and the potential of every human life, FFL President Serrin Foster has built a strong force of women reaching out to women with information and support.  We deserve better than abortion…we deserve better choices.

This year Feminists for Life has gathered a group of eloquent women speakers who tell it like it is…what it means to be a woman.  Traveling to university campuses around the country, they are truly engaging the students’ intellectual development, presenting case studies which illustrate the feminist case against abortion.

Finally, our daughters entering college do not have to accept the status quo dished out by college professors who want to indoctrinate with a pro-abortion bias.  Feminists for Life has paved a way to truth.  We can help.

Think of the young women in your life who are in college.  Tell them about Feminists for Life  and the full range of resources they offer to college students:  helping with abortion research projects, providing pregnancy resources and leading campus workshops and lectures.

Taking heart from women who have paved the way, it’s time for freshmen entering Smith College…and any other college…to teach their professors a thing or two.  Considering what it means to be a woman…when you are talking about abortion…we deserve better.

**********

When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society – so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.    

                         Mattie Brinkerhoff, The Revolution, 1869

King of Lies

September 17, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

In one of the greatest public relations scams of modern times, America is being duped by the King of Lies.

From the inception of grassroots programs in the 1990s bringing abstinence education to teens, Planned Parenthood has fought to extinguish the abstinence message.  In the first years, they were very direct with us.  They hated abstinence education.  Why?  Because sex was a natural right…even for teenagers.  If teens wanted to have sex, they were merely exercising their natural born right to enjoy having sex.

But with escalating birth rates and a new generation of sexually transmitted diseases, parents and public officials were hard-pressed to accept this line of reasoning.  Planned Parenthood and its friends needed to find a new tactic. Putting on their creative hats, they added water and stirred, creating…“medical accuracy.”

Knowing that you only need to repeat a lie often enough for people to accept it, Planned Parenthood has led an unrelenting campaign to convince people that abstinence educators base their programs on bad medicine.  It is a catch-phrase that has caught on, even as this idea is promoted by the one organization in America that has survived by avoiding medically accurate information at all costs.

On their website, Planned Parenthood offers the basics of fertilization of the human egg.  Oddly, passing over medically accurate and captivating modern films of real sperm and eggs creating a living and cell-dividing zygote, they opt for a crude cartoon starring a penis named Peter (Yes!) wrapped up in a tan trench coat.

Peter stars on The G Spot with a nameless Vixen complete with cleavage, the voice of Mae West and a fur-lined dress in the shape of the vagina and vulva.  In their crass comedy routine, where “the genitals tell it like it is,” fertilization of the egg by the sperm ends with Peter inviting Mae West back to his place…because all this talk “really got him going.”

If Planned Parenthood wanted to entertain a six-year-old with cute sperm playing cards poolside as a pearl ovum floats by on a lily pad, they have succeeded.  If they wanted to use the one website in the world that could really promote medically accurate information on how life is created, this cartoon is a dismal failure.

Once Planned Parenthood explains “How Pregnancy Happens,” their next offering is a page titled “Pregnant, Now What?”  In a long-winded, ho-hum, resigned acknowledgment that you must be pregnant, nowhere is there the hint of the joy of conception for a couple who “planned parenthood.”

Nowhere is such a happy couple invited to see a real zygote implanted in the womb developing into a human life.  Instead, shifting attention to all the problems of being pregnant…the missed period, the difficult decision, raising the child by myself…the list of “choices” offered by Planned Parenthood is enough to create clinical depression in an amoeba.

Depressed?  No worry.  The cure for your depression is offered in the next sentence… “You can choose to end the pregnancy.”

But first…

…just to make sure you never encounter any medically accurate information about the “cells attached to the uterus,” Planned Parenthood makes sure to alert you to “so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that are “anti-abortion”. These “fake clinics”, they warn,       advertise free pregnancy testing to “lure women into their anti-choice agenda.”

What Planned Parenthood would rather you not know is that crisis pregnancy centers rely on medically accurate ultrasounds to give women medically accurate information for considering “the choice” being sold to them on a website that prefers cartoons to truth.

On the Planned Parenthood website, looking for just one 4-D ultrasound, I type in fetus on their search engine.  The first offering?  An article listed by Planned Parenthood, “The Bible Is Silent on Abortion,” is written by Rabbi Dennis S. Ross.  Just below, an article, “The President Signs the Dangerous Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” clearly denounces any attempt to create “legal personhood for the fetus.”

And just to make sure you never consider the “personhood” of the fetus they offer to abort, the next article listed by their search engine offers Planned Parenthood’s medically accurate version of fetal development reduced to six lines:

We know that the embryo or fetus cannot feel pain before 20 weeks of pregnancy. Nearly all — 99 percent — of abortions are done before 20 weeks. It is even possible that a fetus is unable to perceive pain at any time during pregnancy. If, however, the ability to feel pain does develop before birth and consciousness, it is likely to happen only after the 28th week of pregnancy, when abortion is performed only for rare, unusual medical situations.

Partial-birth abortion?  It’s never mentioned by Planned Parenthood in medically accurate terms that would lead a person to understand what is happening to the fetus…or baby.  The actual gruesome “procedure” is carefully cloaked by Planned Parenthood behind this banal statement, “The fetus and other products of conception are removed from the uterus with medical instruments and suction curettage. This procedure takes about 10-20 minutes.”  Not one word about stabbing the baby and sucking out the brain from the cranium.

Ultrasound?  A search of Planned Parenthood’s information base gives you the assurance that an “ultrasound can also be used to help locate an Intrauterine Device (IUD) inside a woman’s uterus.”  Pictures offered of a  baby in the womb?  None.  Pictures of an IUD…just follow the Planned Parenthood hyperlink.

Try as one may, using the search engine on Planned Parenthood’s website, there is not one picture of a “bunch of cells” developing in the uterus…the cells at the heart of the choice they will abort for $500 cash, a choice that impacts 1.6 million women and babies every year.

Planned Parenthood leading the charge of a campaign to offer medically accurate information is enough to make a person laugh.  No wonder they fight every legislative effort to enforce Informed Consent.  If only it weren’t so tragic.

Can anything good come from having the King of Lies set the standards for truth? No.  Not one good thing.

Happy Teens

August 20, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Mass Marketing 101 teaches that successful marketing campaigns sell with promises of happiness.  Thus, we end up with hamburgers in the hands of Paris Hilton, scantily clad and writhing seductively in suds washing over the ultimate in cars, a Bentley.

This 2005 television ad had it all…a famous pretty girl, a luxurious car and sex…the ultimate symbols of human happiness.  By all accounts, Carl’s Junior executives were pleased.

This formula is repeated day in and out.  And in modern America, the formula has made its way from adult ad campaigns to those targeting teens…and their younger brothers and sisters.  Playboy bunnies are appliquéd to tops for toddlers, and rhinestones spell out Hey Baby! on the seat of velveteen pants riding low on the hips of ten-year-olds.

Sex sells.  This has become a truism in Mass Marketing 101.  Have a buxom beauty hold a widget while staring seductively through the camera lens, and you’ll sell a million widgets.  If we buy their widget, we will be best friends with the buxom beauty and we will be happy.

Everywhere, sex is connected with happiness.  Entire prime time television series serve up episode after episode where pretty people spend all of their time thinking, talking and doing sex.  And sex educators take their cue.

Paid by Planned Parenthood, educators stand in front of teens and remind them that “sex is natural…when you are ready, we can show you how to do it ‘responsibly’…your parents don’t have to know…after all, sex is your right…you have a right to be happy…and sex is the basic human drive that leads to happiness.”

Consequences?  Well, if you manage to encounter a consequence when your saferrrrrrrrr sex practices fail to “protect you,” Planned Parenthood has a tool kit of remedies.  You can detect your consequences through testing.  You can treat your consequences with drugs.  And you can destroy your consequences with a “surgical procedure.”  After all, you have a right to be happy.

This is the world we have created for our teens…to make them happy.

Wrong!  We are wrong.  We have been wrong for years.  And now a poll by The Associated Press and MTV of 1,280 young people ages 13-24 lays out for adults what our teens really want in order to be happy.

“What makes you happy?”  Teens resoundingly reply, “spending time with family.”  Kristiana St. John, 17, from Queens, New York, says, “They’re my foundation…My mom tells me that even if I do something stupid, she’s still going to love me no matter what.  Just knowing that makes me feel very happy and blessed.”

Money?  Almost no teens responded “money” when asked what makes them happy.

Sex?  In spite of the hard sell by television and the saferrrrrrrrr promises of Planned Parenthood, “being sexually active actually leads to less happiness among 13-17 year olds according to the survey.  If you’re 18 to 24, sex might lead to more happiness in the moment, but not in general.”

Future Goals?  Marriage.  Ninety-two percent of these young people either definitely or probably want to get married.

Religion?  More than half of the young people said they believed in a higher power that has an influence over their happiness…nearly half said religion and spirituality are very important to them.

Reading through extended reports on the survey, the good news is that teens seem to know more about happiness than we give them credit for.  If we wanted to help them move toward happiness,

  • we would affirm the value of religion and its role in their life and decisions,
  • we would help them maintain a “general stress-free feeling” where they were “not worried about anything”,
  • we would teach them skills needed to create successful relationships leading to happy marriages,
  • we would strengthen the bonds between students and their parents, and
  • we would link the deepest desires of young people for education, family, marriage and children into a meaningful life plan.

The best news for parents and adults is that we have educators who have made it their goal to truly help teens reach happiness.  This latest survey and its results confirm what these educators find from their work in the classrooms.

Who are these educators?  Working with many different agencies and programs around the country, they teach and encourage teens to abstain from sex until marriage as a way to eliminate stress and negative consequences from their life.  They build bonds between parents and teens.  They support parental goals by giving teens medically-accurate information.  And they teach life-skills to help in developing healthy relationships today and in building a foundation for healthy marriages and parenting in the future.

These educators are leading the way to happiness for teens.  Yet, they struggle against the “wisdom” of a culture saturated with “sex-will-make-you-happy” messages and promises that, if not “safe,” sex can at least be “saferrrrrrrrrr.”

You can play a part in the effort to support teens in their quest for happiness.  Check out the National Abstinence Education Association at www.abstinenceassociation.org.  Review the research and reports that tell the truth about abstinence education.  And watch for action alerts as Congress debates whether students should be able to have abstinence education.

It is time for us to take hold of the messages sold to our teens by the media and by “sex-will-make-you-happy” teachers.  Our teens have told us what they need in order to be happy.  It is time for us to listen.