Finding a Home for Progressives: A home for Sex Ed

I have been visting the Daily Kos community for long enough to realize that my favorite diaries are the ones that bring the personal into the political.  Writers like nyceve, and OrgangeCloud115 have shown me the incredible work that can be done by being our honest selves.
For some time, I have been looking for a voice to do some great work here myself, and over the past year I have gone on a great journey through our nation's social services that I think should be shared.  
The year had it's highs and lows, and covers enough issues facing progressive Dems to be relevant here.  So please join me in recounting my first year in Finding a Home for Progressives . . .

This diary will be an introduction and background to the series which will recount the birth of my son son,my marriage to his mother marriage, and our search for a home for our new family.  It's my take on the Great American novel, while providing commentary on the social systems that we encountered along the way.  

My name is Matt, and I have grown up in an affluent, northeast liberal environment for most of my life.  I attended both public and private primary education, and attended a prestigious DC university.  I was there during the 2000 elections, and became interested in politics and grassroots activism.  I saw my friends arrested at World Trade Organization protests, I organized film screenings, and I talked political philosophy both in and out of class.

After graduating I eventually came to work for a non-profit organization of mixed review in this community, where I still work to this day.  I like the work that I do, and feel that our organization makes a significant differnce on many of the issues that are debated here on a regular basis: global warming, transportation, predatory loans, and so on.

I met my wife in high school, we grew up in the same affluent, liberal northeast town.  After I graduated college I was visiting home for some time and we started dating.  Our relationship became serious and I made the decision to relocate to the area permanently.  

This meant living with my parents to afford housing on my non-profit salary, which is the arrangement my wife, my son, and myself still have to this day.  
The story that will follow over the coming weeks and days is the story of negotiating entrenched market forces from a progressive perspective, one where to work we do to provide a decent future for our children and our neighbor's children is the most important thing we can do.  

It's a mostly happy story, but it will reveal faults in our public housing, healthcare, and credit systems that might surprise you.  

The story starts last October when my wife and I found out she was pregnant.  As with many pregnancies, ours was not planned, and it caught us by surprise - she was 6 months pregnant!

Our ignorance of the preganacy may seem implausible, but let me say it isn't.  My wife never missed a period until month five, and never had morning sickness.  She obviously was gaining a tummy, but we both had attributed this fact to a drastic change in lifestyle she underwent while working on a campaign with me that summer.  Many here know that the food you get during campaigns often isn't the most healthy.

So here we were six months into an unplanned pregnancy.  How could such a thing happen?  How did she get impregnanted?  My wife was using birth control at the time, but she was also on antibiotics.  This was the reason.

We were in the middle of a pregnancy because of our own ignorance.  Two, college educated people that had the benefit of health class the covered contraception and sexual health.  If the interaction between medical contraception and antibiotics was covered, we missed it.  But there are many who don't even have the chance to miss it.  
From an NPR/Kaiser Family poll

And in spite of the fact that only 15 percent of Americans say they want abstinence-only sex education in the schools, 30 percent of the the principals of public middle schools and high schools where sex education is taught report that their schools teach abstinence-only. Forty-seven percent of their schools taught abstinence-plus, while 20 percent taught that making responsible decisions about sex was more important than abstinence.

Regardless of your personal view on the morality of sex, all high schools should have a comprehensive sex ed curriculum.  Abstinence only education will hurt students for the rest of their lives.  High school students provide the only captive audience for a topic that every individual, whether straight or gay, Catholic of Shi'ite, needs to understand at some point in their life.  Your sister or nephew, yourself or your friend will have to face the reality that having sex has consequences, regardless of your gender,your orientation, or your marital status.  Just because you are married does not mean that you understand your sexual health.  According to a ground breaking study published in the British medical journal the Lancet and summarized here

Marriage does not always protect against sexual health risk. In Uganda, married women are the group for whom HIV transmission is increasing most rapidly, and a study in Kenya and Zambia showed that the sexual health benefits of marriage for women are offset by a higher frequency of sex, lower rates of condom use and their husbands' risky behaviours. In Asian countries, where early marriage is encouraged to protect young women's honour, early sexual experiences can be coercive and traumatic and, with respect to early pregnancy, dangerous for mother and child.

Let me say it again - sexual health education will help everyone regardless of race, creed, orientation, or gender identification.  Progressives everywhere need to stop playing defense and get on the offense with this.  We are not encouraging young christians to go wild in the woods with crazy orgies.  We are educating our society so that we can all make informed decisions.

I feel for those who don't have the education and the support I do.  My wife was truly distressed for weeks after we found out, and I was lucky enough to have paid vacation time to take in the immediate aftermath to spend time with her and make a plan for us.  The next chapter will cover the first steps we took with our new pregnancy.