This (PDF) letter has been making the rounds (Feministing, Feministe, Pandagon):
This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception. The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.
Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
With all the twigging on the phrase, I thought it might be fun to translate. Mine is: responsible adults=married christian people. What say you?
Posted by binky at June 26, 2006 12:00 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Reproductive AutonomyI don't see it. No matter what they might have been thinking when they wrote it, I think the document intends to mean people who are old/mature enough to handle having a baby without their lives being wrecked.
Posted by: jacflash at June 26, 2006 12:47 PM | PERMALINKAnd those are people who are what, 57?
Kidding aside, it's not the responsible adults who need access to contraception. As you say, if their lives aren't wrecked by reproducing, then they are ready. It's the rest of us (irresponsible adults, young adults, etc) who really need access to birth control. The statement to me says, "we support making sure the people least likely to need birth control are guaranteed to have it. fuck the rest of you."
Posted by: binky at June 26, 2006 12:54 PM | PERMALINKThey seem to want the smallest role for government possible. Even if that ends up calling for the most pointless government policies one can think of (sure the government works - for those that don't need it in the first place).
And so if something isn't effective 100% of the time it should be encouraged (or even mentioned)? Wow, better not apply those standards to their foreign policy team.
Posted by: Armand at June 26, 2006 01:01 PM | PERMALINK
i'm with binky re the gravamen of the statement, and i'm with armand re its absurdity. my minor contribution arises from my predictably persnickety attitude toward grammar: while it may be true that only those people who actually follow an abstinent lifestyle (all 12 of them over 17 or so) enjoy 100% protection against pregnancy (STD's, and especially HIV, may be transmitted in other ways, so yet another flaw in the statement is its misstatement of that elementary fact), it's certainly not true that "teaching abstinence" "is
a 100% effective means" of anything. in fact, the data suggests about the only thing it's 100% effective at is increasing the HIV infection rate in the third-world countries we've been applying it to since the party of purity took over and started indexing foreign aid to dubious propositions of christian morality.
the only thing this admin is 100% effective at is obfuscation and denial.**
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** speaking of 100% certainty, they're really good at death ("culture of life" notwithstanding), but kind of crappy about taxes.
Sure, it's dumb. I'm still not seeing that it's a Christianist statement, though.
Posted by: jacflash at June 26, 2006 03:52 PM | PERMALINK