WASHINGTON POST - Catherine Rampell - SEX ONLY FOR THE RICH?
EXCERPT:
Our country apparently doesn’t want low-income Americans to have free access to birth control, either by compelling all insurance plans to offer it or by adequately funding public reproductive health programs. In many schools — predominantly located in low-income, high-teen-pregnancy areas — we don’t even teach kids how contraception works. We also don’t want them to have easy access to abortions when they inevitably get pregnant because they’re not using birth control, with states such as Texas and Mississippi trying to shutter their few remaining abortion clinics.
Then we don’t help them very much after they birth those unplanned kids, instead publicly chastising irresponsible single mothers for having babies they can’t afford and offering little assistance in the form of child care, education or cash. Dumping unwanted children onto the child welfare system isn’t exactly celebrated, either...
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SISTER HERE:
I guess it depends where you live, but where I live there are plenty of free and low cost opportunities for contraception as well as abortion. And while I certainly think schools should be teaching more about sex than when I was a girl and it was limited to film and discussion lead by a mother/nurse about having periods and the mysterious unification of egg and sperm, I STILL THINK IT IS UP TO PARENTS TO EDUCATE THEIR CHILDREN IN NOT ONLY THE FACTS OF LIFE, but also the ethics and morals that they believe in. Sure the children will rebel, but if you teach children about personal and social responsibility, there's a chance they will THINK before they act.
