Time For The Governor of Missouri to Learn Maths!
Let's talk about Missouri.
This bill is staggering in its madness, and the ridiculous presuppositions that are necessary in order to think it is even remotely a good idea.
Primary amongst those presuppositions is the idea that centers providing abortion, contraceptive, and sex-education services are motivated by profit, and pushing an agenda designed to funnel as many young Americans as possible into their clinics in order to make an awe-inspiring profit from the services being performed: in short, keeping teenagers addicted to contraceptives and abortions in a manner reminiscent of the tactics practiced by tobacco companies.
Profit as a motivating factor behind holistic sex-education is both entirely unreasonable due to the volunteer nature of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and entirely reasonable given the corporate nature of other American wellness services: with healthcare serving as a particularly topical example of profit at the cost of well-being. I get that. While it's not entirely unwise to navigate corporate America with the knowledge that a lot of people are looking to make money off of your misfortune, in this case that wariness flies in the face of tangible proof to the contrary.
For a very succinct commentary on some of the motives behind this, check out the Slacktivist's interpretation of the same argument as it appears in the Left Behind series.
The validity of this abortions-for-profit argument is highly dependant on a faulty perception of the way in which contraception does or does not work -as well as holding a stance that maintains the immorality of utilizing contraception. To posit that Planned Parenthood’s scheme is to funnel secondary school students into a lifetime habit of purchasing contraceptives does not take into account the fact that the contraceptive MOST likely to be taught comprehensively to students is condom use, and Planned Parenthood centers throughout the country happily provide condoms free of charge while the price of other contraceptives is based on a sliding scale dictated by the wealth of the patient in question-up to the prices set by the pharmaceutical companies that produce the contraceptive products in the first place. If anything, the donation- and government- funded organization loses a fair amount of money the more frequently poor people utilize the resources provided.
If contraceptives are not the moneymaking service that Planned Parenthood provides, that leaves STD testing and treatment, or abortion services. Since conventional logic dictates that these two services run directly counter to any monetary gain that might come from educating middle- and high-school students on the proper use of contraceptives--particularly those that also prevent STDs, it requires a supremely fallacious leap in reasoning in order to make the claim that inspired the latter half of the Missouri bill.
Fortunately, we can find precisely the sort of data interpretation necessary to convince ourselves that organizations like Planned Parenthood are busily advertising Abortionz for $$dollarz$$. Enter Jennifer Roback Mors, Ph. D.
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.
Excitedly maintaining the misconception that correlation always equals causation* , Dr. Morse’s statistics-if one takes her conclusions to be accurate-enable the next deductive leap: if contraceptives are inherently less effective the younger and poorer the user might be, then encouraging youth to have “safe sex” is more like encouraging the students to have children or-more likely if we’re dealing with that accursed institution Planned Parenthood-have abortions. At no point do Dr. Morse’s conclusions take into account that poorer and younger women might not be knowledgeable enough to use the contraceptives properly, might not have the money required to keep a constant supply of the products, or may not have the personal agency necessary to tell their boyfriend ‘no’ when he asks to try just one night without a condom.
This bill does not take into account any realistic methods of extending the monetary and educational advantages of the middle class to secondary school students, instead it compounds the disadvantages of poor education and poor access based on some ridiculous assumption that teenagers are naturally resistant to birth control or are perhaps more fertile than their middle aged counter parts.
Particularly interesting is the manner in which the author of this article framed her argument (disingenuous as it is). The title clearly demands that the government ought to be kept out of citizens' sex lives, thereby planting the argument soundly in the realm of the positive in the eyes of most Republicans, who are, by the contemporary definition of their party, pro-small-government. At no point does Dr. Morse talk about removing government involvement entirely, however. Instead she focuses on the federal funding provided to comprehensive sex-education curriculi.
The same people who teach sex education, which increases the demand for purchasing contraception, also sell the “solution” to contraceptive failure, which is abortion. Yet the federal government spends about $12 on contraceptive-related programs to every $1 spent on abstinence education.
We don’t give federal grants to tobacco companies to teach students “low-risk” forms of smoking on the grounds that “kids are going to smoke anyway.” We shouldn’t be giving federal grants to groups that sell contraception, to teach kids to use contraception
Her use of small-government phrasing is no accident, and intentionally panders to a conservative base that might not otherwise be interested in hearing what she has to say.
*She taught Economics at Yale for 15 years. Dollars to Ivy League donuts says she knows this is a giant pile of horseshit.
This bill is staggering in its madness, and the ridiculous presuppositions that are necessary in order to think it is even remotely a good idea.
Primary amongst those presuppositions is the idea that centers providing abortion, contraceptive, and sex-education services are motivated by profit, and pushing an agenda designed to funnel as many young Americans as possible into their clinics in order to make an awe-inspiring profit from the services being performed: in short, keeping teenagers addicted to contraceptives and abortions in a manner reminiscent of the tactics practiced by tobacco companies.
Profit as a motivating factor behind holistic sex-education is both entirely unreasonable due to the volunteer nature of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and entirely reasonable given the corporate nature of other American wellness services: with healthcare serving as a particularly topical example of profit at the cost of well-being. I get that. While it's not entirely unwise to navigate corporate America with the knowledge that a lot of people are looking to make money off of your misfortune, in this case that wariness flies in the face of tangible proof to the contrary.
For a very succinct commentary on some of the motives behind this, check out the Slacktivist's interpretation of the same argument as it appears in the Left Behind series.
The validity of this abortions-for-profit argument is highly dependant on a faulty perception of the way in which contraception does or does not work -as well as holding a stance that maintains the immorality of utilizing contraception. To posit that Planned Parenthood’s scheme is to funnel secondary school students into a lifetime habit of purchasing contraceptives does not take into account the fact that the contraceptive MOST likely to be taught comprehensively to students is condom use, and Planned Parenthood centers throughout the country happily provide condoms free of charge while the price of other contraceptives is based on a sliding scale dictated by the wealth of the patient in question-up to the prices set by the pharmaceutical companies that produce the contraceptive products in the first place. If anything, the donation- and government- funded organization loses a fair amount of money the more frequently poor people utilize the resources provided.
If contraceptives are not the moneymaking service that Planned Parenthood provides, that leaves STD testing and treatment, or abortion services. Since conventional logic dictates that these two services run directly counter to any monetary gain that might come from educating middle- and high-school students on the proper use of contraceptives--particularly those that also prevent STDs, it requires a supremely fallacious leap in reasoning in order to make the claim that inspired the latter half of the Missouri bill.
Fortunately, we can find precisely the sort of data interpretation necessary to convince ourselves that organizations like Planned Parenthood are busily advertising Abortionz for $$dollarz$$. Enter Jennifer Roback Mors, Ph. D.
A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.
Excitedly maintaining the misconception that correlation always equals causation* , Dr. Morse’s statistics-if one takes her conclusions to be accurate-enable the next deductive leap: if contraceptives are inherently less effective the younger and poorer the user might be, then encouraging youth to have “safe sex” is more like encouraging the students to have children or-more likely if we’re dealing with that accursed institution Planned Parenthood-have abortions. At no point do Dr. Morse’s conclusions take into account that poorer and younger women might not be knowledgeable enough to use the contraceptives properly, might not have the money required to keep a constant supply of the products, or may not have the personal agency necessary to tell their boyfriend ‘no’ when he asks to try just one night without a condom.
This bill does not take into account any realistic methods of extending the monetary and educational advantages of the middle class to secondary school students, instead it compounds the disadvantages of poor education and poor access based on some ridiculous assumption that teenagers are naturally resistant to birth control or are perhaps more fertile than their middle aged counter parts.
Particularly interesting is the manner in which the author of this article framed her argument (disingenuous as it is). The title clearly demands that the government ought to be kept out of citizens' sex lives, thereby planting the argument soundly in the realm of the positive in the eyes of most Republicans, who are, by the contemporary definition of their party, pro-small-government. At no point does Dr. Morse talk about removing government involvement entirely, however. Instead she focuses on the federal funding provided to comprehensive sex-education curriculi.
The same people who teach sex education, which increases the demand for purchasing contraception, also sell the “solution” to contraceptive failure, which is abortion. Yet the federal government spends about $12 on contraceptive-related programs to every $1 spent on abstinence education.
We don’t give federal grants to tobacco companies to teach students “low-risk” forms of smoking on the grounds that “kids are going to smoke anyway.” We shouldn’t be giving federal grants to groups that sell contraception, to teach kids to use contraception
Her use of small-government phrasing is no accident, and intentionally panders to a conservative base that might not otherwise be interested in hearing what she has to say.
*She taught Economics at Yale for 15 years. Dollars to Ivy League donuts says she knows this is a giant pile of horseshit.