Category Archives: Medical Issues

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.

The Real Problem with Abstinence Education

August 13, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Opponents of abstinence education have spent the past ten years denouncing these important health education programs.  Their attacks are relentless.

Opponents are not content with allowing abstinence programs to serve students, schools and families that want this education.  They are not content to let abstinence education exist as an alternative to other programs promoting use of birth control as a “saferrrrr sex” message for minors.

Opponents want to kill abstinence education.  Completely. They work tirelessly to strip every penny of funding support for abstinence programs that encourage and support students who make a personal commitment to remain sexually abstinent.

One has to wonder what the real problem with abstinence education is.  Why is it so terrible to teach our youth the importance of remaining sexually abstinent?

Opponents would have us believe that medically accurate information supports encouraging teens to engage in “saferrrrr sex.”  It doesn’t.  Opponents would have us believe that abstinence education doesn’t work.  It does.

These two battles are actually smoke screens.  Diversions.  They hide what we are not supposed to see.  What opponents of abstinence education would like to bury in the sand is their real reason for opposing sexual abstinence education for teens.

Abstinence education is about revealing truths its opponents would rather ignore.  Abstinence education does not suggest that outercourse, petting, or naked showers together are several of many healthy and satisfying options to abstinence that teens can choose from when they “are ready.”

Abstinence education shines a light on the problems inherent in promoting sex as entertainment without rules, seeking gratification for one’s own pleasure without concern for those we impact as a result.  Abstinence educators are not afraid of acknowledging the life in the womb created by the union of egg and sperm.

It restores a line in the sand.  It dares to stand up for true medical accuracy.  It is supported by a growing body of research about the foundational needs of humans.  It embraces the impact of sex on the welfare of a human being in holistic terms, not only just physically, but emotionally, socially, financially and spiritually.

Studies confirm what abstinence teachers around the country see in their classes.  These truths resonate with young people who have not been corrupted by years of liberal dogma.  They know when their hearts are broken and when they have been exploited by someone who professed “love” only to get the sex they were after.

Teens want love, honor, fidelity.  They look to adults, the role models who are in charge of demonstrating higher goals, only to find these “role models” either wallowing in the mud…or more often…confused about the role of sex in their own lives.

American media, entertainment and marketing industries have capitalized on this confusion, exploiting the natural human tendency to want to satisfy our appetites while ignoring the consequences.  We buy their products, and cultural “rules of engagement” allow them to market this message to children just entering kindergarten:

  • Supreme Court justices in 2004, preserved the right of pornographers to use the Internet unrestrained in their promotion of material harmful to children.
  • Girls of the Playboy Mansion, a television “reality” show, builds destructive fantasies of three twenty-something girls sharing the bed with an 81-year-old leering millionaire.
  • Abercrombie and Fitch glamorize teen group sex in wall-size murals greeting our youth and their younger siblings as they enter the store at the mall.
  • College health centers serve as a pass-through to local abortion agencies with little or no mention of adoption.
  • Leaders in the most visible health crisis of the century, when challenged by a physician at an HIV conference, refuse to set sexual abstinence as the expected standard for children at any age.
  • Hollywood adultery is considered a harmless transitional stage between marriages, and this has been adopted by mainstream politicians hoping to lead our country as President.
  • Magazines like Redbook and Seventeen that used to offer wholesome articles now sell promiscuity and risky sex behaviors on every page.

For nearly forty years, we have been “educated” that the problems encountered with sex can be cured by buying a pack of pills and a “medical procedure.”   This education is only possible if we are willing to ignore medically-accurate truths.  This is the very education that opponents of abstinence hope to force on every child in America.

People who oppose abstinence education oppose it for one simple reason. They don’t want their culture to be challenged and reined in by limits to sexual behavior…of any kind …at any age.  And that’s no good reason at all.

Doomed to Fail

July 16, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Daddy was a product of his generation, growing up on a large Kansas ranch in the 1930s.  Behind the barn, he smoked his first cigarette at eleven years of age, the initiation of a life-long habit that eventually killed him.

Marlboro Man…Lucky Strike…the sign of “cool”, a cigarette perched on the lips of cowboys and movie stars…kids were naturally born on a path to become smokers, and in 1955, the cigarette could claim 57% per cent of the male population as “users.”

Undaunted by the social acceptance and prevalence of smoking, in the 50s, health workers launched a campaign to begin an education of the public to the dangers of tobacco.  In 7th grade science, I watched movies of smoking machines depositing tar into glass tubes.  And in spite of denials from the tobacco industry, news reports began to link smoking with heart disease and cancer.

Progress was slow.  By 1965, 52% of males were still smokers.  Ten years of advertising for change, and still over half of American men 18 years of age and older continued to smoke.  One might have considered the campaign doomed to failure.

Daddy was evidence of this failure.  In spite of his analytical nature and the mounting evidence against cigarettes, he remained entrenched as a smoker.  His sister died of emphysema…my Dad continued to light up.  My uncle underwent surgery for lip cancer…my Dad continued to smoke…two packs a day.

My sister and I went off to college, non-smokers both of us.  Eventually, my mother gained a concession from Dad.  He would at least move his smoking out-of-doors, onto the back patio.  But elevators, restaurants and offices…those were a different matter.

One night at the dinner table, he recounted the insult of being asked by someone not to smoke in the elevator.  “Can you believe that?” he asked.  “This is a free country.  They don’t have any right to tell me what to do!  If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke.”

The Marlboro Man eventually died of smoking.  So did my dad.  Joe Camel Cool was sent to prison.  The tobacco industry finally caved in to the evidence.  Warnings from the Surgeon General are legislated on every pack of cigarettes.  And Turner Classics have been edited to remove cigarettes from the lips of Bogey and Bacall.

But wouldn’t you know it.  The campaign to rid our country from smoking is doomed to fail.  In 2004, one fifth of the total population, male and female, continued to smoke.  In the prior year, 48% of young adults 18-25 had smoked, and during their lifetime, 69% of them tried this deadly habit.  Failed. We are doomed.

We might as well admit that smoking is a temptation that will entice young people.  We may as well face failure straight in the face and give up.  Let’s not hurt their self-esteem.  We certainly don’t want to make them hide a secret habit.  Since kids are going to smoke anyway, let’s teach them to choose their cigarettes wisely.  Smart smoking…if they are going to ignore our warnings and light up, let’s at least teach them “safe smoking.”

Ridiculous?  Then consider the consistent doom and gloom of “sexperts” who chastise health educators who want the best for our youth and have set their expectations on creating change.

Abstinence education?  Doomed!  Kids are going to have sex anyway.  Give up.  Let’s teach them to enjoy sex.  We don’t want them to hide their sexual encounters.  We don’t want the facts to scare them…let’s let them believe the myth of “safe sex.”

Doom and gloom?  This is the foundation of the push to legitimize sex for teens as an acceptable and “safe” behavior.  They’re going to do “it” anyway.

But are they?  Data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that the fear of increasing rates of teenage sexual behavior may be unfounded. For example, teenagers seem to be waiting longer to have intercourse. The percentage of 12th-grade U.S. students who reported having had intercourse declined from 66.7% in 1991 to 60.5% in 2001.

This six percent decrease is all the more incredible when you consider that these teens live in a sex-saturated culture that refuses to deglamorize casual random sex.  It is miraculous when you consider the prevalence of “sexperts” who continue to promise “saferrrrrrrrrr sex” as the follow up to “safe sex” which has been thoroughly discredited by science.

Doomed to fail?  If history is any teacher, the surest way to lead our youth to failure is to teach them they have no other alternative.

Doomed to fail?  If teachers believe teens are doomed to fail and build an educational program founded on failure as an expectation, what choice will our teens have?

Failure as an expectation?  Then we are indeed doomed.

Teaching Denial and Ignorance

July 9, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

America is caught in a battle for the health of our youth.

When left to the common sense of parents, informed and supported by medical facts, clearly the health of our youth depends on their ability to maintain sexual abstinence until marriage.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirms this sexual abstinence message…although…to avoid public castigation by liberals bent on social re-engineering, the CDC couches their approval in careful linguistics:  The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.

The average person attests to the wisdom and truth of this message, citing their own life experiences…both the bad…and the good.  Sex is a wonderful gift, if treated with respect.  Boundaries for behavior are protective.  But wait.

If liberals could have their way, young people would be taught that all sex is created equal (uninhibited), and that you can do anything (absolutely anything) you feel you are ready to do with another person (or persons) who feel they are ready to do it, too (consensual sex), hiding behind a bit of latex (protection), without fear of consequences (free and natural).

If liberals could have their way, this message would begin early…in kindergarten…and be legally mandated and federally funded.

But wait.  The only way to proceed with the liberal message of free sex is to live in denial and ignorance about the costs of free sex.  And, yes, if liberals could have their way, they would have our children do just that.

The battle over sex education, from the liberal perspective, is really a battle to deny truth and to live in ignorance.  Truth about sex is being reaffirmed by research.  Only a person who insists on living in denial can escape the reality of the cost to our youth of promoting “free sex.”

  • Condoms do not adequately protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).  Incurable virus and infectious bacterium live on areas of the body not covered by condoms and not visible to the human eye.
  • Even when treated and cured, STDs can exact a permanent cost.  Infertility is a painful lifelong consequence of several STDs that wreak havoc on the reproductive system.
  • Incurable genital herpes, a virus that condoms cannot claim to prevent, now infects at least one in six over the age of 12.  This is one facet of an epidemic of STDs that infect over 70 million Americans today and leads to 19 million new cases each year.
  • Victims of STDs are not created equal.  Women, with their internal reproductive system, are more susceptible to STDs and their serious consequences.  Teen girls are at an even greater risk, with their still-developing tissues and organs especially vulnerable to STDs.
  • Emotional consequences of sex are rooted in the chemical makeup of human beings.  Oxytocin, a chemical released during sexual activity, creates emotional bonds and vulnerability for women which may explain the higher rates of depression in sexually active female teens.
  • In spite of all the HIV/AIDs awareness campaigns over 20 years, HIV infection continues to occur, with approximately 40,000 new infections annually.  Seventy percent of new infections are in men, and half of all new infections are in people age 25 or under.  Condoms are not recommended by manufacturers as “safe sex” for anal intercourse.
  • The CDC reports that “[i]n the United States, HIV infection and AIDS have had a tremendous effect on men who have sex with men (MSM). MSM accounted for 71% of all HIV infections among male adults and adolescents in 2005 (based on data from 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting), even though only about 5% to 7% of male adults and adolescents in the United States identify themselves as MSM.”

The list could go on…and on…and on.  Yet, safe in their world of denial, liberals in partnership with the media chide medical experts and educators for speaking the truth about the costs of sex.  Preferring denial to truth, liberals dismiss these facts with epithets such as “fear-based”, “shame-filled” and “morality-driven.”

Further still, not content to live in denial themselves, liberals insist on teaching denial to our children.  The consequence of their educational plan is to send our children into the world totally ignorant of the truths that could motivate and help young people make the healthiest choice to abstain from sex until marriage.

No wonder that college students Dr. Miriam Grossman (Unprotected) counsels at UCLA are surprised when they realize their emotional and physical pains are linked to current and past sexual activity.  Reared in a liberal culture that spent years cultivating ignorance, these students were denied the information they needed to make the best possible choices for health and happiness.

America is caught in a battle for the health of our youth.  If you want to know where you stand in this battle, consider the cost.  Who is the winner when we teach denial and ignorance?

Previously-Chewed Chewing Gum

June 18, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Ugh.  Ick!  It used to freak me out as a teen when I accidentally touched a piece of gum under the table at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.  Yuck!  Nasty!  It’s been in someone’s mouth.  Saliva, spit, germs…gross!!!!!!!!

Years later, my daughter Jamie is a germ freak.  I’m convinced this came as the result of food inspections by the Department of Health at the Cinnabon shop she worked at.  Fastidious attention to cleanliness was essential to keeping up health standards, and today she insists on bottles of bleach under the kitchen sink and around the house.

It’s even hard to have a family picnic these days.  Double dipping chips…a la Seinfeld…has become a crime punishable by excommunication.  Backwash, from sipping your soda through a straw?  Execution!

Television validates our squeamish fears of getting germs from others.  Jordan Cavanaugh, medical examiner, pries a wad of orange-flavored gum from under the pay phone.  Voila.  DNA analysis, and trace amounts of saliva nail down the culprit.  Case solved!

CSI…crime scene investigators, on their third inspection of the temple where four praying monks were murdered, find gum on a Buddha statue.  Analysis reveals cooking spices in the chewed gum.  Suspect is confronted.  Conviction!  Bam.  Case closed.

Hmmm…DNA on a wad of chewing gum?

At all levels, for the average person, sharing germs…on a wad of chewing gum, by double dip, backwash, or any other fashion…is either gross or criminally dangerous.  But sharing germs of the intimate kind…from sex…well that’s safe…if you ask some “sexperts”…and if not safe…then it’s “safer.”

Safer than what?  Two bites of a Dorito double-dipped in salsa?  Leaving your chewing gum behind after you commit armed burglary?

Grocery stores now offer Sanicarts as you enter the store, wet wipes to sanitize the handle of the shopping cart used by some unknown germ-carrying humanoid before you.  Comedy routines have us laughing at the common effort of many to get out of the bathroom without touching the door handle, touched by so many other sickly people before us.

But sex germs?  No problem.  Sexperts who want to serve up condoms to teenagers chafe at the suggestion that we should establish sexual abstinence until marriage has the expected standard for youth.

Sex germs?  These “sexperts” don’t want to dwell on the negative.  That would be fear-based.  That would be unrealistic…they preach…because kids are going to have sex.  They can’t help it.  Young people cannot control themselves…not now…not ever.

Sex…our children…and sex germs?   These “sexperts” reassure us.  Sex germs?  They’re consensual germs.  That makes it OK.  A person, even if she’s only fourteen, consented to having those germs placed inside, outside, all over and anywhere…by a responsible, mature and caring person…who…

…who…what?

…also consented to being infected by nasty, icky, yucky, gross…germs?

What am I missing here?  Germs are germs.

If chewing on germy, pre-chewed chewing gum…if the thought of this is enough to make us gag…

…then why would any sane person jump into bed with the first consensual babe, and every other consensual babe after that…only to end up sharing germs?