There has been much hullaballoo about the Portland, Maine school district's decision to allow school nurses to prescribe birth control, including pills, to girls as young as 11:
http://www.npr.org/...
The actual pill would not be prescribed without a doctor's approval and prescription. The school already makes condoms available.
The opposition to this plan has come not only from the usual suspects, but also nominative progressives such as Ed Schultz of Air America. While I understand the gut reaction to the idea of 11-year olds having sex, I find the reaction to the school board's decision based largely in a lack of imagination. Everyone who hears this story immediately thinks, oh well I would be so upset if MY 11-year old were having sex! Of course you would. And your 11-year old is probably not having sex. But to deny that there are children out there having sex is to be in denial about reality, and often some pretty harsh reality that might not be in your family but is undeniably in others'.
The question is not, "Should the schools, aka the government, be prescribing birth control without parents' knowledge," as Pat Buchanan and other would like to frame it, but, for those kids who ARE having sex, should we allow them to endanger their lives with pregnancies their bodies are not big enough to handle and/or diseases they will have their entire lives?
Girls at the age of 11 are not very good decisionmakers. It's a fair question whether anyone at that age can be considered to be "in control" of such a decision. To expect them to consider the consequences of their actions is in some cases just not possible. Sadly, too many kids are not even taught how you get pregnant at that age, let alone how their body works and how birth control works.
I understand that rightwingers and other conservative-minded people in this arena think that to allow kids birth control is to give them a green light to have sex. Well I'm willing to trade more kids having safe sex for less teenage pregnancies and less STD's floating around the population in general.
Oh, and as a side note, can we clear something up? I heard not one but two different people refer to the birth control pill as "estrogen." It is most emphatically NOT estrogen, it is the opposite: synthetic progesterone, or progestin. Some pills contain a small dose of estrogen to counterbalance the effects of progestin, but as it's specifically designed to prevent women from ovulating it's a smaller dose than you would be experiencing naturally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Female hormones 101: Estrogen is what causes women to ovulate. Progesterone follows the estrogen half of the cycle and is meant to support a pregnancy. If one becomes pregnant, the progesterone levels remain high to prevent a second pregnancy. If no pregnancy occurs, they drop and the estrogen cycle begins again. Oh, and ladies, if you find your sex drive ailing, it's probably because you are not ovulating for one reason or another: wrong part of the cycle, you're on the pill, you're breastfeeding or have reached menopause. Most of you I hope are aware of this, yet surprisingly few people overall including doctors seem to be.