It seems fair to ask: does reproductive freedom include the freedom to reproduce?
In Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, Sylvia Ann Hewlett explored the lives of highly educated, high earning women as they turned fifty—women who had broken through the glass ceiling. After the tenth interview, she realized that none of them had children. And they all regretted it.
There is a secret out there, a painful, well-kept secret: At mid-life, between one third and one half of all high-achieving women in America do not have children.61...The vast majority of these women did not choose to be childless. Looking back to their early twenties, when they graduated college, only 14 percent said they definitely had not wanted children.
I had assumed that if these accomplished, powerful women were childless, surely they had chosen to be. I was absolutely prepared to understand that the exhilaration and challenge of a megawatt career made it easy to decide not to be a mother. Nothing could be further form the truth. When I talked to these women about children, their sense of loss was palpable. I could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and sense it in their words.62
Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, and others writing curricula are in an ideal position to prevent some of the future anguish and regret of women discovering that their window of reproductive opportunity has closed. They could, for example, include some of the facts I’ve mentioned in their classes for twelfth graders. They could suggest students read Creating a Life. But don’t hold your breath. A unit on fertility would highlight the differences between men and women, and students might realize the value of marriage and families. Who knows what could result? A girl might even—gasp—reconsider her plans to become a neurosurgeon. No, it won’t happen any time soon.
I see things differently. I believe that authentic feminism protects women and girls: their health, their choices, and their dreams. If sex educators genuinely cared about young women having accurate and complete information about childbearing, and about preserving their reproductive freedom, their curricula and websites would include this difficult truth: delaying parenthood indefinitely, especially while living a life of casual sexuality, places your dreams of motherhood at risk. Those who object to this “sexist” message need to accept this reality: biology itself is sexist, and that’s unlikely to change—even with threats of legal action from the ACLU or NOW. If you take issue with that, well, don’t gripe to me about it. Take your complaints to a higher authority.
Chapter Six
Questioning
YOUNG BISEXUAL WOMEN1 and gay men have the highest rates of genital infections, due in part to early sexual activity. For this reason alone, you’d think educators would target these students with a stern, no-nonsense message of self-restraint. It’s critical that you delay sexual relationships, you’d expect them to say, exploring same sex activity can be particularly dangerous. But even with this vulnerable group, it’s the same old story: a green light to early experimentation, detailed how-to instructions, and an assumption of multiple partners.
About their decision to explore same-sex behavior, teens are repeatedly advised, “Do what feels right to you,” and, “It’s important to always feel good about yourself.” But we wouldn’t instruct anyone, let alone a teenager, to “do what feels right” regarding other risky behaviors—smoking, drinking, or drug use. These experts seem to neglect how kids will feel when they’ve got open blisters on their genitals or test positive for HIV. For these life and death decisions, how can “educators” recommend kids follow their feelings?
You want to see madness? Log on to a few sites2 recommended by sex educators and search under “LGBTQ”—the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning. That should do it.
An enthusiasm for risky liaisons isn’t the only problem you’ll discover. First of all, the ideology on these sites is suffocating. Instead of sounding an alarm about health risks—the association of oral sex with cancer of the tonsils, for example, or the epidemics of HPV and syphilis among gay men3—kids get a hefty dose of leftist indoctrination and recruitment .4 On these websites, the enemy is not genital infections; it’s our oppressive, heterosexist society. Instead of HIV, Republicans are in the crosshairs.
On sites recommended by educators, kids are constantly reminded that the country is permeated by homophobic negativity.5 Sexual minorities—everyone not strictly heterosexual—are in the same position as African Americans before the civil rights movement: suffering from widespread ignorance, prejudice and unfair legislation. Teens can make a difference—by becoming activists for change.
On Sexetc.org, a site recommended by SIECUS, kids learn about a group called Soulforce, whose mission is “to promote freedom from religious and political oppression for LGBT people.” They ride on a “Bus for Equality,” visiting Christian schools “with policies that exclude openly LGBT young people from enrolling.” If they’re allowed on campus, Soulforce members explain how harmful homophobia is. If not, they “find creative ways” to assert their presence off-campus; “This often leads to arrest.”6 The lesson: these kids are to be commended for taking action against injustice.
Advocates for Youth goes a step further—they pay for kids to travel to Washington to participate in four days of Youth Activist Training. The program promises to enhance teens’ skills in grassroots, campus, and online organizing as well as media outreach. It includes a day with congressional staff members, who school teens in effective lobbying techniques.
Social agendas drive the discussion of psychological issues too. Contradicting widely accepted principles of emotional development, kids are reassured that confusion about sexual identity is normal7 and healthy, and that preferences naturally change with time. “Your sexuality is a work in progress,” they’re instructed, “a life-long adventure.”
What? It’s healthy to be confused, a lifelong adventure? Not according to anything I ever learned about human development. I checked a pile of textbooks, as well as online material from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Society for Adolescent Medicine, and see nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s the resolution of doubt that promotes emotional stability—and the sooner the better.
Finally, on many of these sites, every type of intimate behavior—including some you’d rather not know about—is discussed in a breezy manner, sometimes with language and graphics you wouldn’t allow in your home.8
Question: Are the people at SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and AFY aware of the dangers they’re encouraging kids to fool around with? Do they agree with everything the sites they recommend to kids promote? And if they’re not aware of the content of websites and books they’re recommending to teens... shouldn’t they be?
Lucky You
Let’s begin by delineating a principle of human development. Each stage of development—infancy, toddlerhood, school age, adolescence and adulthood—is accompanied by specific tasks. For example, infants must gain the skills to sit, stand, and walk; preschoolers must learn to share their toys and visit the toilet. In every case, there is an inner drive—a maturational push—to master the task at hand and move to the next stage.
A task of adolescence is to move toward a firm and cohesive identity. 9 Who am I? Where do I belong? What do I believe? To some degree, all teens ask those questions. Am I vegetarian, atheist, “goth,” or conservative? Should I join the army, go to college, or get a job? Of course, teens must tolerate some ambiguity while they mature and sort things out, but in time, a consistent and enduring sense of self is achieved. This brings a young person satisfaction and a readiness to take on the tasks of adulthood. This is what growth is all about.
Identity: the sense of self, providing sameness and continuity over time
Identity crisis: a state or period of psychological distress, especially in adolescence, when a person seeks a clearer sense of self.
It is axiomatic that people want to know who they are. Confusion and self-
doubt therefore implies some degree of distress. Teens might feel mixed-up about almost anything, of course, but identity is a particularly significant issue, and if identity confusion is deep or drawn out, the distress can be significant. In order to face the challenges of adulthood effectively, the adolescent question, “Who am I?” must be answered.
Except, it appears, with sexual orientation. In that case, the educators who claim to be promoting your children’s growth and health dump this principle. There’s no inner need or drive to clarify this part of yourself, they say; it’s imposed on you by society. “There’s a lot of pressure to define yourself,” explains gURL.com,10 as if the source is completely external. Restrictive labels may not apply to you, teens are told, but be prepared for everyone else’s insistence to place you neatly in one of their boxes.
The bottom line? Kids should resist the pressure, labels, and boxes. They should remain open to all the options, check them out,11 and feel good about themselves along the way. In this paradigm, doubt—“maybe I like boys and girls,” and exploration—“I’ll try it and see”—represents growth, not crisis.
Where does this come from? Open-mindedness cannot be a goal of identity development. Otherwise, what does identity even mean, if it’s not a lasting conviction of who you are? And if sexual orientation is “a fundamental piece”12 of who we are, “an essential human quality,”13 who we are “deep down,”14 as kids are taught by sex educators,15 persistent uncertainty about it cannot be healthy.
Columbia University’s “GoAskAlice” is an award winning site manned by “a team of health counselors.” When a 12th grader, who has already had three boyfriends, wonders about relationships with girls, she’s encouraged to “explore” and “experiment.” Being willing to do so, she’s told, “will only add to your future well-being and peace of mind.”
I am unable to find a study that supports that advice. To the contrary, what’s well documented is the many ways this 12th grader would benefit from delaying sex, with boys or girls. In general, the earlier she begins sexual activity, the greater the number of partners she is likely to have. Early sexual debut and high numbers of partners are linked to a variety of negative life outcomes, including increased rates of infection with sexually transmitted diseases, increased rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and birth, increased single parenthood, decreased marital stability, increased maternal and child poverty, increased abortion, and yes—increased depression.16
Could someone at Columbia direct me to the research showing a positive association between sexual experimentation by teen girls and their future peace of mind? “Alice” has no hard data to back her up; the advice is based on Kinseyan ideology: womb to tomb pansexuality. If this teen’s health and peace of mind were the priority of these health educators, their advice would be the opposite.
Time out, Alice would tell her. Even with consistent condom use, having so many partners is going to land you in the doctor’s office. There’d be straight talk with all the sobering facts. Instead, Alice is comfortable that this girl—not yet out of high school—has already had three sex partners; she appears eager, in fact, for her to add a fourth and fifth.
“If you like women, fantastic,” she’s told. “If you like sex with both guys and girls, lucky you.”17
Shades of Lavender
Kids learn from an early age about these discrete categories: gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual. But when they’re older, they’re informed these sexual orientations exist on a continuum.18 They’re not either/or. Heterosexuality lies at one end, gay or lesbian at the other, and in between lie a multitude of possibilities. Individuals use different labels—er, descriptions—of where they fall on this continuum. Ambisexual. Bi-lesbian. Bi-queer. Dyke. Fluid bisexual. Heterosexual with questions. Lesbian who has sex with men. Not straight. Pansexual. Polyfide. Polysexual. Queer. Unlabeled.19
“Wherever you are on that continuum,” teens learn on outproud. com, “you’ve got plenty of company....”20
“Some argue that there are as many sexual orientations as there are people,” teens learn on Columbia’s Alice, “everyone defining for themselves their own rules of attraction, fantasy, and relationships.”21
Gurl.com provides a visual of the spectrum of sexual orientation: twenty-three female silhouettes in shades from dark lavender, representing “totally gay,” to white, “totally straight.” Click on any of these figures to find quotes from girls and women ages fourteen to forty-one who placed themselves at that point.22A sampling:“I’m a turbo lesbian! I love women! I had my 1st lesbian experience when I was 11 and would never date a man.”
“ . . . I don’t believe in drawing lines. You’ve got to keep your mind open to possibilities . . . .You can find love in the strangest places!...I’m 100% open to suggestion.”
“Today I’m a light lavender. I was more purple in college . . . anything might happen.”
“I experience sexuality as a fluid thing... I appreciate people who keep things interestingly mixed up and cultivate the art of ambiguity.”
Pay attention, parents. Your child may like the possibility that “anything could happen,” or be drawn to “the art of ambiguity,” and be headed for turmoil.
One of the most fundamental premises of psychology is that, in order to build an acceptable, coherent sense of self, young people actively seek to answer the question, “Who am I?” Persistent uncertainty about core identity leads to inner turmoil. We’re all familiar with kids who cannot decide on long-term goals, group loyalties, or value systems. They are pulled in different directions, it causes distress, and they are pre-occupied—with both the conflict and the distress. There may be significant anxiety, mood swings, self-doubt, and worry about the future. It may impair their academic or social functioning.
These kids may have difficulty making decisions or show impulsive experimentation. They may “try on” different roles to see what feels right.23 A person without a coherent identity is seriously handicapped. If the issue remains unresolved, there may be difficulty making commitments to careers or relationships. Friendships and family relationships may deteriorate. Educational achievement may be lower than ability.
But while it’s self-evident to child development specialists that a firm identity enhances well-being, sex educators have a different perspective: an uncertain identity, along with “safe” experimenting, is also fine—not just in adolescence, but any time. In fact, kids learn, with sexual matters, identity confusion is an identity: you are “questioning”—the Q in LGBTQ. It’s as valid a category—perhaps even more—as the others.
What Am I?
Matt has turned to the experts at Planned Parenthood’s site for teens, wondering, “Is it natural to be confused about your sexuality?” 24
Yes, he’s told, it’s “normal and very common. Many adults are still figuring it out. Understanding sexual orientation is “a lifelong process,”25 Matt would learn on positive.org,26 a site endorsed by SIECUS. Advocates for Youth agrees: Everyone has questions about their sexuality at some time or other, they claim.27
Wait a minute. It’s normal to be confused? Everyone has questions? Since when?
Yes, many teens experience brief insecurity about their sexual identity. I won’t argue with that. But what’s common is not necessarily healthy. Kinsey used the same logic sixty years ago: his data indicated a high frequency of certain behaviors; therefore, he claimed, those behaviors represent a normal, healthy variant. The logic was faulty then, and it’s faulty now. As one of his critics pointed out, if at a given time more people have the flu than not, that doesn’t mean that having the flu is normal. Likewise, just because it may be common for teens to question their sexual orientation, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for them to do so.
The claim that confusion is natural and experimenting is healthy, will, for many kids, prolong or intensify an already difficult process. Our job—the job of anyone guiding teens—is to support them through periods of insecurity and caution against exploring. Furthermo
re, experts in child development know that as adolescents seek to define their identity distinct from family, negativism appears—just like in two-year-olds. “I can do it myself... Don’t tell me how. . . don’t tell me what to wear/where to go/who to be friends with . . . ”
Adolescent negativism sometimes means taking up behaviors that drive their parents crazy. Teens must announce, “I have a mind of my own,” and they may seize on almost any issue to prove that. Once upon a time, that meant sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. Now, in some vulnerable individuals, that struggle may lead to exploring “alternative” sexualities or genders. These kids might get their parents’ goat by identifying as non-straight (“Mom, Dad—I’m gay”), or gender-bending (“Mom, Dad, don’t call me Robert any more. I’m a girl. Call me Roberta.”).
For all these reasons, introducing doubt about sexual orientation (“many homosexual people don’t realize it for years,” or “who you’re most attracted to today might not be the same as who you’ll be eyeing five years from now”28), and encouraging sexual behavior should be avoided at all cost.
Nevertheless, the oligarchy leads kids to believe that questioning, confusion, doubts, experimentation... they’re all good.
Exploration
From Columbia’s Alice:Participating in safe sexual encounters and activity, whether with men, women, or both, can provide wonderful opportunities to learn about your likes and dislikes, passions, and goals.... Questioning your sexual orientation or sexual identity is by no means a sign of a problem; .... While you may feel confused about your attractions right now, you should know that your feelings are completely normal, as is exploring them. Enjoy! 29
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