Maybe this might help.
Kids Need to Fall in Love with the Idea of Chastity
By Mary Beth Bonacci
Well, women — if you’re 18 or over, you can now get the “morning-after pill” over the counter, without a prescription. Of course, if you’re 17 or under, you can’t get it unless you make an appointment, go to your doctor and get a prescription to be filled at the pharmacy.
Yeah, right.
Does anybody really believe that the FDA’s new “two-tiered” policy which makes the “Plan B” pill available over the counter only for women over 18 is really going to restrict the drug to women over 18? Did these people ever go to high school? Do they have any familiarity at all with teen culture?
When I was in high school, Colorado had a law restricting the sale of alcohol to persons over 21 years of age — except for 3.2 beer, which could be purchased by anyone 18 or over. I don’t recall having any problem getting my hands on any of it at any age. The beer was especially easy. By the end of the first semester of the school year, half of the seniors had turned 18. It didn’t take much to find someone willing to make a “beer run” in exchange for an invitation to the party. And, in the absence of a legitimate 18-year-old, we could always find someone with a fake ID.
Does anyone seriously think that access to the Plan B pill will be any more difficult?
Show me a sexually active teenaged girl who doesn’t have an older friend, an older sister, an older boyfriend or a “cool” aunt, and I’ll show you a girl whose friends almost certainly have older sisters, friends, boyfriends and aunts. Somebody will make a trip to the pharmacy for her.
I’m not proud of the fact that I drank beer in high school. Doing so put me in numerous dangerous situations, which I escaped only by the grace of God. But the consequences of my high school “partying” pale in comparison to the consequences of easy access to the Plan B poll.
Plan B is essentially a very high-dose birth control pill. (Odd, isn’t it? The regular low-dose pill still requires a prescription, but a much stronger version of the same drug is available over the counter. Go figure.) It is supposed to be taken, according to the FDA, after unprotected sex or birth control failure (i.e. condom breakage). The problems with widespread access to this powerful drug are numerous. First and most obviously, there are medical reasons it’s only been available by prescription. There are risks associated with its use, the primary one being blood clots. It also functions, at least part of the time, as an abortifacient, changing the lining of the uterus so that a fertilized egg cannot implant.
The factor, however, that concerns people most is that easy access to Plan B will almost certainly lead to an increase in teen sexual activity. Girls have one less excuse. Any guy over 18 can promise to stop at the corner drug store the next morning and “take care” of any possible pregnancy. Vulnerable women will become even more vulnerable. How can we protect them?
To me, this whole situation just illustrates the folly of basing teen abstinence education on the fear of pregnancy. This has been a favorite “soap box” of mine for quite a while. I know pregnancy is the most obvious consequence of teen sexual activity, so it’s tempting to use it as the “hook” to discourage that sexual activity. Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen countless books, flyers, curricula and billboard campaigns warning teenagers about the trials and tribulations of teen parenthood.
The problem with this type of approach is that it isn’t pro-chastity so much as it is anti-baby. If there’s no baby, there’s no problem. And, in this day and age, there are plenty of ways of avoiding the baby while still indulging in the sexual activity.
This is very important. We don’t encourage teen chastity simply because we don’t want teenaged girls to get pregnant. We encourage teen chastity because God created human sexual expression to speak a very powerful and profound language — the language of permanent self-donation between a husband and a wife. When we take it out of that context, we hurt ourselves on many, many levels. We encourage teen chastity because chastity is beautiful and positive, because it helps teens (and everyone) live real, honest love. And love is what they’re looking for.
If a teenaged girl is abstaining from sexual activity purely because she fears pregnancy, the easy availability of the Plan B pill will make her think twice. But if a girl is abstaining because she sees sexual expression as a beautiful, positive, holy gift to be shared between a husband and a wife, it won’t matter one bit how accessible “emergency contraception” is to her. It won’t even appear as a blip on her radar screen. She won’t see the need for it. With a Plan A like that, they’ll have no need for a Plan B.
.
)