In a meditation on a recent outbreak of scares among his students, and on the circumstances leading to pregnancy scares in his own past, Hugo Schwyzer asks and then I think nicely answers a really important question.

I’ve been thinking more about why so many young people I know choose not to use contraception. The gal who came to see me yesterday had been on the Nuvaring, but her insurance coverage lapsed, and she couldn’t get the scrip refilled. She and her beau had condoms available, but chose not to use them. “I don’t know why we’re so stupid”, she said to me yesterday. The young man I work with who came to me last week, worried his girlfriend might be pregnant, also reported that “condoms were available” at the key moment, but “we went ahead without them anyway.” I wasn’t shocked. When I got my high school girlfriend pregnant, we had condoms nearby as well. I didn’t like wearing them, and my girlfriend said she hated the way they felt. So we used them “some of the time”. And predictably, a pregnancy resulted.

The $64,000 question is: “Why?” Why do bright, educated young people who are very clear about how exactly babies are made choose to have unprotected heterosexual intercourse so very often? Why, on many occasions, do they find such flimsy excuses for not using contraception, even when contraceptive devices are easily available? In some cases, of course, lack of affordability is an issue — condoms aren’t as cheap as some folks think, and other forms of prescription contraception have grown much more expensive in recent years. In other cases, one partner (almost always the male) will nag the other about how “uncomfortable” condoms are. But in plenty of cases, these young people have access to reliable methods of birth control, and choose not to use them. Ignorance is not an all-encompassing explanation, and neither is expense. Something else is at play.

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The sex education we need is about more than “protection.” It’s about more than providing access to abortion as a last resort, thought that remains an important component of justice-centered sex ed. Proper education will center on what sex means and what it doesn’t. And we can start by gently, firmly, and lovingly tearing down the myth that unprotected heterosexual intercourse represents the most intimate and magical expression of trust and love. Until we deconstruct that lie, we only tempt the unprepared to jump too quickly the lives they have to come.

He said it here.

That’s an amazingly thoughtful suggestion for inclusion in comprehensive sex education.

At least in most progressive circles we’re already good at pointing out that millions of people manage to have perfectly wonderful sex lives without penis-in-vagina intercourse to ejaculation — the central… sometimes the only (“I did not have sex with that woman”) significant heteronormative sex act.

And thanks to concerns about sexually-transmitted diseases (if nothing else) we’re already pretty darn good at stressing the importance of condoms.

But yeah, we haven’t been so good about busting the idea that unprotected PIV intercourse without a condom is as intimate, or maybe as ultimate, as sex gets.

Speaking for myself I was never that crazy about intercourse while fertile. I mean, sure, after my vasectomy reversal it was nice having the intention of being reproductive. But I got my vasectomy in the first place, at age 21, because the prospect of reproduction (in the pre-herpes, pre-HIV days when all known STDs were treatable with a single shot of antibiotics) stressed me to the point that I just wasn’t up to it. (Sometimes literally.) And I already had an appointment for a second vasectomy before our last planned, wanted child was born. (I think I had it only ten days after.)

Call me a prudish libertine, or a libertine prude, but carrying either transgression nor romance past a certain point approaches the objectification of a third person. And if that construction makes one squeamish then… well… so much the better! However the individuals ultimately deal with such a resulting pregnancy it’s a very big deal that, no matter how you slice it, is best avoided.

The key, maybe, is instilling an understanding that a “planned” (by omission) but unwanted pregnancy isn’t an ultimate thrill.

Update: Prompted by a comment from Five of Nine I need to clarify that while I zeroed in on Schwyzer’s point about the need to address attitudes towards unprotected intercourse in both sex education and popular culture, going beyond education initiatives it’s also really, really important to continue pressing for policies that make contraceptives for both genders that are safe, effective, easy to use, available, and affordable!

June Carbone, guest-blogging at Feminist Law Professors says

After dramatic successes in the nineties, teen births are rising and rising most, not for those who like the Palins have the resources to support their grandchildren, but for those families who cannot support the children they already have.

The figures had been heartening. Teen pregnancy and birth rates fell dramatically during the nineties. Between 1991 and 2005, overall teen pregnancies declined by thirty-four percent. The most promising news was the decline in teen births to the most vulnerable mothers. African-Americans experienced the steepest drops with a 42 percent decline among adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 between 1991 and 2002, and an even greater decline (an astonishing 52%) among African American girls in the 15 to 17-year-old age group.

Abortions also fell during the same period, and commentators of the right (abstinence promotion) and left (contraception) competed to claim credit. The results are now in. John Santelli, in the American Journal of Public Health, reported that 86% of the drop in teen pregnancies were the result of more effective contraception; 14% from greater abstinence.

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This progress, however, has not been maintained. Teen births have begun to edge back up.

Read the quote in context here.

Gee, do you think the 2005 law altering federal Medicaid subsidies that doubled and tripled contraceptive prices to student and low-income clinics is helping to decrease or accelerate this trend?

It’s very nice to have confirmation that sex education works. And to have confirmation that comprehensive sex-ed covering not abstinence, yes, but (evidently far more importantly effective) use of contraception works better than abstinence-only.

It’s not so great that we’ve started falling down on the job not only in sex education and, probably more important, availability of and encouragement to use contraception, but also in matters of boundary setting, establishment of self-worth, interpersonal negotiation, and personal responsibility for all parties. I mean, remember, while women alone become pregnant it takes a woman and a man to get pregnant. Therefore every unplanned, unwanted pregnancy isn’t a single failure (as virtually all abstinence-only and too many comprehensive programs tend to emphasis) it’s a double failure.

Make that a triple failure: by failing to take the matter seriously we adults are failing our children as well.

While researching an article for RHRealityCheck Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon discovered she’d bought the same primary-season fallacies I’d bought. A bit of water under the bridge perhaps (so I’ve obscured some names in the excerpt) but

I also bought the [primary-season —fl] narrative that while Obama is spotlessly pro-choice in every way, he doesn’t consider the issue a priority.  What I found was that’s not true at all.  Obama doesn’t just sign off on pro-choice legislation, but he actively introduces it.  He’s introduced the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act, and was a co-sponsor of the Prevention First Act, which reads like a wish list of pro-choice policy items.

She said it here.

No matter what happens with the elections, no matter what happens with Roe and the Supreme Court and the antics in various throwback states (one hopes the answer is “Roe gets strengthened not hollowed out), and no matter that William Saletan sees it as a reaction to 90-era fear of conservatism, I love that Prevention-First Act philosophy of preventing unplanned, unwanted pregnancy in the first place. I knew Senators Clinton and Reid were cosponsors and big supporters, I didn’t know Obama helped introduce it. Good for him.

Update: Make that a possible unpleasant surprise. According to Ann Bartow, yeeks! Prevention First may become very necessary if the five-vote anti-choice majority in the Supreme Court no longer feels constrained to prop up Bush/McCain administration.

Note: I began anticipating something like this, and the need for something like Prevention First, back in 1996.

Heather Corinna of the sex-ed site Scarleteen, and others, remind us that

September 25th is the last day to submit public comment on the proposed HHS regulations which are not only superfluous, but more importantly, would further limit access to reproductive healthcare (and other healthcare) services in the U.S., particularly for those who already have the greatest limitations to care, like teens.

It’s so important to have public comment on this, so if you have not done so yet, take a few minutes tonight and be sure to get something in.

• • *

I am writing to urge you to stop efforts to block women’s access to basic reproductive health services.

I understand that the proposed regulations that the Department of Health and Human Services released on August 21, 2008 expand existing law to allow more health care providers and institutions to refuse to provide needed care.

As written, the regulations could allow institutions and individuals — based on religious beliefs — to deny women access to birth control and permit individuals to refuse to provide information and counseling about basic heath care services. Moreover, they expand existing laws by permitting a wider range of health care professionals to refuse to provide even referrals for abortion services.

For those of us working in healthcare, the onus is on us to choose a clinic or an area of practice where we know we want to provide the healthcare services offered to clients, and which we feel is in alignment with our personal values or religious beliefs. It should not be on those seeking needed health services. It is our responsibility — and we have the greater agency as as workers — to seek out the work we want, and leave the work we do not want, or do not feel we can live with, to those who are supportive and can honor any given job description. It is also our responsibility to take a job earnestly, not disingenuously. In healthcare, we have an extra responsibility, which is to put our clients needs and their physical health — not our ideas about their spiritual health — ahead of our own, and to care for them in the way which is best for them, objectively, rather than in the ways we feel would be best for us, or feel our religion would mandate.

Read the rest of her article here. Seriously!

It’s a pretty big deal and your comments (pro or, I guess, con) can make a big difference. The reproductive-health website passes along a link to an online comments form at Physicans for Reproductive Choice and Health. You can write your own comments or just use the template letter they provide. I’ve added mine, please consider adding yours.

Thank you!

figleaf