Faux moderation on abortion and sex ed

It’s not a trend yet, but here’s more faux-moderation in line with what President Obama just treated us to in his Notre Dame speech. In It’s Time to Find Common Ground on Sex Newsweek’s Lisa Miller analyzes President Obama’s speech on abortion and concludes that it was more about sex than it was abortion. I believe she’s correct about that, and clearly tries to be evenhanded in this article. But she’s incapable or unwilling to really understand the views of those of us who oppose abortion. And this phrasing drives me up a wall:

folks who believe that comprehensive sex education is the best way to assure that young girls don’t unexpectedly find themselves at the abortion clinic

I know what the writer means by this; she’s describing an unplanned pregnancy, of course. But young girls, unless they have been rendered unconscious and carried there without their consent, do not “unexpectedly find themselves” at an abortion clinic. They GO there. They may have been transported there by the school nurse. But it’s certainly a decision they are aware of and presumably had at least some input into, not some wacky event that happened to them. It’s just the latest in a series of bad decisions they’ve made. Decisions that the left generally feels parents should have no part of.

No, we generally are not in favor of sex ed at school. If “comprehensive” sex education included what it did when I took it in the early 80s – basic human anatomy, puberty, tab A fits into slot B, birth control methods include the following… even in the conservative evangelical circles I run in, few would object. That’s all stuff we tell kids at home after we opt them out of sex ed at school- along with the main message of “Don’t do this; it’s not time in your life yet for this.” What we object to is the attitude that teen sex is normal and inevitable and we should quit squawking about it. We object to schools teaching bizarre sex practices like fisting. We object to the theory that teenagers are mindless bags of hormones who can’t be expected to control themselves.

Miller presents the opposing view in an extremely limited fashion: prolifers are people who “believe that no woman should feel too poor or too on the margins to carry a baby to term.” Well, we do believe that. But the idea that we want to make it more convenient for a woman to carry her baby to term, as if our goal is primarily about helping the woman, is simply not true. It is our belief that the baby is a living human being with a right to continue living. Helping the woman is the method of keeping the baby alive. I’m not against helping women who need help. By all means, let’s help them. But the reason we particularly want to help them at that time is because of the baby.

Implying that poverty is the main reason women want abortions is simply wrong:

Guttmacher says only 23% say the primary reason they want an abortion is they can’t afford a baby, yet the Newsweek reader is left with the false impression that poverty is the main reason; that throwing money at the problem via a new government program will fix it. And the main reason prolifers are exercised about this issue goes completely unmentioned. Well played!

The premise of the article is that since it’s intercourse that makes all these babies, we need to sort out where we stand, as a culture, on the topic of sex. It’s a good point, but it’s as dishonestly treated as Obama’s faux-moderation on abortion. He says things that sound nice when you don’t listen closely, but carries on with taxpayer-funded baby killing, including requiring US taxpayers fund abortion in other countries. I get the impression we’re supposed to be grateful that he acknowledged prolifers exist and that he’s civil. Where we stand is in a hypersexualized culture that devalues parenting.

Our teens are political pawns for the left. They’re helpless victims of our prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes), socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship, mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer. The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.

In Obama’s spirit of bipartisanship and moderation, the article makes the very mild suggestion that the left could take the great step of “conceding that sex is an activity best enjoyed by mature people in a committed, loving relationship” while the right concedes that “a condom, easily obtained, might prevent a lot of heartache down the road.” (Then again, with a 14% failure rate, it might not. The left is pretty sanguine about the condom failure rate while they use the fact that teens sometimes stop being abstinent as a reason to abandon the idea.) But the “reasonable” position in this article is evidently that the left can finally admit what’s painfully obvious, and the right can get busy doing exactly what the left wants. Well. That certainly sounds fair to me.

Cross posted to PH

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