And the Attack on Women’s Reproductive Rights Continues…

There is a serious lack of sexual education in this country and that’s no secret. One of the smartest young women in my life believed that the rash of teenage pregnancy in her school could be contagious and that possibility scared her so much that she wanted to have her uterus removed. She was a freshman in high school. She was in high school and she believed that pregnancy was a contagious condition. This is just one disturbing example of the serious holes we’re leaving in the sexual education of our youth. Between the talk she had with her parents and the pro-abstinence sexual education class she took in junior high school, no one managed to teach her that unprotected sex leads to pregnancy.

This dangerous lack of sexual education seems backwards as we’re living in a society where television, movies and the radio are teeming with explicit images. And every other day there’s a story in the news posing another law that threatens to strip women’s reproductive rights. Abortion and birth control used to be a matter of choice but with state governments moving against the institutions that advocate and provide those and other women’s reproductive health programs, the choice is being stripped away.

No birth control. No emergency contraception. No abortion. And now, an attack on single parenting. Wisconsin Senator Glenn Grothman has authored a bill that will consider “nonmarital parenting” as a contributing factor in child abuse and neglect. So wait… we are making moves against reducing unwanted pregnancy while criminalizing the women (because most single parents are women) who make the choice to have kids without getting married. It just keeps getting worse.

What do you think? Is it abusive to have kids out of wedlock?