Posted on 10/16/2007 6:18:58 AM PDT by Daffynition
Students who have parental permission to be treated at King Middle School's health center would be able to get birth control prescriptions under a proposal that the Portland School Committee will consider Wednesday.
The proposal would build on the King Student Health Center's practice of providing condoms as part of its reproductive health program since it opened in 2000, said Lisa Belanger, a nurse practitioner who oversees the city's student health centers.
If the committee approves the King proposal, it would be the first middle school in Maine to make a full range of contraception available to some students in grades 6 to 8, said Nancy Birkhimer, director of teen health programs for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. Most middle schoolers are ages 11-13.
(Excerpt) Read more at pressherald.mainetoday.com ...
I just wanted to get that of my chest because many always talk about no sex before marriage but they never mention what age marriage should begin! The more marriage is delayed amongst our children the less chances they will be able to keep chase.
But in our day and age when we are seeing youth not only finish college but then go on to a masters degree and so on and delay marriage it will be harder and harder for marriage to be a choice for the young - as you say they will ditch marriage at the first rough patch.
But it is good you also pointed that out so as to clarify it in case anyone missed it.
“See my #17 - any comments and solutions from a Christian perspective (outside of my marry them off early) besides calling teenagers skanks, etc?”
T, more than 100 years ago, in a village in southern Greece, my great grandmother was taught by her mother that you have your children until they are twelve years old. After that they belong to the world. Nothing has changed and it never will.
America so needs the orthodox (small ‘O’) Christian religion. Jumping up and down in church on Sunday and watching movies on how the apocalypse will unfold in movie theater like churches is not hacking it.
Find a way to get them to be mature in their teenage years again, and that might not be such a bad idea.
Some of them have babies at age 14 (sometimes younger) - I know, because I teach 14 year olds with children, and I teach 14 year olds with mothers under 30.
I was commenting on how human biology (and the solutions society came up with to handle it over thousands of years) has been undone in under a century. I was not offering a solution so much as offering an observation.
Our great grandparents may seem like they were more chaste than this generation but they married younger - The Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony where a boy becomes a man at 13 was not invented as an excuse to throw a party - 13 was the age a boy became a man old enough to start a family.
I have no answer other than to observe that in the past marriage at a young age helped reduce this pressure on teens (a modern concept - no one talked of teenagers as a separate age group until the baby-boom).
The poor used to marry earlier (presumably to reduce the costs to the family of feeding the child and that they died younger than the wealthy classes) than the upper classes who waited until their late teen and early 20s about 150 years ago.
During the Colonial American era until maybe the early 1900s young girls were often married by the age of 13 or 14 and if women weren’t married by the age of 25, it was socially humiliating.
So now we are asking boys and girls who would have been married off a century ago not to have sex until they marry in their mid 20s or later. That is difficult if not impossible - it may not be that our modern teens are 'sluts' just that we have developed a culture counter the biological clock?
Ping!
I heard Hillary this morning: “We’re not talking about a stampede of girls here. We’re talking girls who, for whatever reason, have been [pregnant pause] ABANDONED by their families...”
It was on Glenn Beck!
I agree.
Many of the youth groups out there aren’t even doing that though (or even showing movies on rapture).
We had a youth group where the leader was not always around and the kids would hide in the broom closet and make out.
This is also the same group that played “Texas Hold’em” on Wednesday nights because goodness knows that they needed “chill time” from the hard week of studies. “Attendance was too inconsistent for a Bible study”. Just as well, because when there were Bible studies-it turned into a litany of guided imagery exercises or pro-socialism discussions.
Just how many times can a youth group watch the movie “Signs” anyway? Answer: A LOT.
Oh yeah...we left, but not soon enough.
— The best summation of the Portland School Committee's 7-2 vote to approve offering birth control to King Middle School students as young as 11 came from one of the commentators on this newspaper's Web site.
It's a real distinction, said "PortlandMike," (no, not me) for the city's school board to become a national disgrace twice in the same year.
But it has achieved that difficult feat, once by being incompetent at staying within its budget and now for facilitating dangerous actions by kids.
This gargantuan bit of overreach is based on a sad truth -- some children, even ones as young as 11 (or even younger), are engaging in sexual activity.
But where exactly is it written in the Liberal Handbook that the way to handle a tragic situation is to make it worse by 1) encouraging it through implicit approval by offering (wholly inadequate) tools to conduct "safer sex" and 2) telling those who see the utter unwisdom of this course of action that they are the ones who don't understand the situation because "kids will always have sex"?
If you want kids to refrain from smoking, even though some kids will smoke no matter what you do or say, you don't give them filter cigarettes because they're safer than the unfiltered kind. Instead, you teach them about the dangers of smoking and make it illegal to sell them tobacco.
If you want kids to keep from drinking, even though some of them inevitably will, you don't give out hangover remedies and referrals to Alcoholics Anonymous. You teach them about the dangers of drinking and ban selling them booze.
And if you want kids not to do drugs, even if some of them cannot be kept from putting their lives at risk, you don't give them clean needles and purer forms of cocaine. You . .. well, you get the picture.
But when it comes to sex, our highly credentialed educational professionals go nutso.
First they deny that there are any parallels, by claiming that warning kids away from risky behavior is effective in every other circumstance except sex.
Then they say that keeping girls from getting pregnant is more important than any other moral or physical concern.
Rates of middle-school sexual activity in Maine are dropping (from 23 percent to 13 percent since 1997, according to one study), with 17 pregnancies reported in that age group in Portland in the past four years.
Still, suddenly it has become necessary to "prevent pregnancies" in the 11- to 15-year-old demographic by offering "a full range of contraceptives" at the King health clinic for kids who have their parents' permission to get medical aid there.
True, such devices, if used correctly, may keep a girl from becoming pregnant (though the idea of two youngsters mastering the art of condom use in the throes of passion seems somewhat unlikely). But none of them except condoms (and those imperfectly) offer any protection at all against sexually transmitted diseases.
So, parents who give their kids permission to get birth control are giving them permission to contract a number of diseases that could render them sterile, give them cancer or remain a contagious, incurable affliction for as long as they live. "Safer sex," indeed.
Then there's the whole parental responsibility thing. Despite the Portland policy requiring parental approval, our state's lawmakers, in their less-than-infinite wisdom, have already said that our kids can get birth control from other sources -- or, for that matter, have an abortion -- without ever consulting their parents.
In order to protect the very few who might suffer from abuse, they override the rights of the vast majority of ordinary, loving moms and dads who are responsible before God for their children's upbringing.
There's proof that parental involvement works. A study to be published in January in the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization says that state parental involvement laws are effective in reducing...
Once these 11 year old girl get a 21 or 28 day pack, there are consequences if they miss even one day. They loose protection for over a week. Therefore the BCP is giving them a sense of protection but puts them at risk without 100% compliance of following the recommended proceedure to take the pill.
There are potential complications for taking combination estrogen/progesterone BCP. There is an increase in thrombosis and deep veinous thrombosis and therefore pulmonary embolus, an increase in heart attacks, increase in stroke. Estrogen tends to close the epiphyseal growth plates of long bones earlier, so the childrenss' anatomy may be adversely affected. The incidence of liver cancer is increased. If the child becomes pregnant and does not realize it during the organogenic phase of developement (1st 12 weeks) taking these hormones will have an adverse affect on the developing baby. Oral contraceptives increase the risk of hypertension, heart attack, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, gallstones, migraines, and many other potential complications.
These are some of the reasons why physicians are the proper people to administer these drugs and require a followup with the patients.
Who is going to be held legally liable for informed consent from an 11 year old. When one of these kids die from one or another complication who is going to be sued? Will these school board? Will the nurse who is in charge of handing the drugs to these children. When an 11 year old fails to take the drugs and gets pregnant, and has dystocia (small pelvic outlet) and has to have a C-section to deliver a baby, who is going to be held liable. When these kids are 28 and finally understand that these drugs resulted in sterility (for many reasons) as a result of taking these BCP who is going to pay for that? I have not heard anyone on TV or in the MSM carefully examine these very real potential problem of giving hormones to females with "developing and maturing reproductive systems".
This is one of the most irresponsible things I can think of for a School Board to do. They are not qualified to make a determination about how, and to whom, controlled substances should be subscribed.
Better get your kids out of those school systems....they are experimenting on those kids and where that will lead is anyones guess. Ask yourself....would you (a grown woman) or (husband of a wife) go to a nurse who works in a school system for your medical care? Does that make sense. The school nurse has been historically used to clean scrapes, look at a child and decide he needs to go home, or go to the doctor. This plan will lead to many difficulties, and the children unaware will pay the price. This decision will result in the death of someone.
Perhaps the firestorm that this school district decision has created will bring some good ... and parents will become more involved, talk to their kids, etc. The mixed message this edict sends is wrong and to an already confused, rebellious teen, deplorable.
I know! Let’s just declare an f-ing free-for-all!
That’s just about all that’s left, why wait? Let’s all just be animals and stoop to the final last dehumanizing behavior, beastiality?
ARGH!
I started this train of thought because I did not want people calling kids sluts.
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