In 2008, 17-year-old Bristol Palin was thrust into the spotlight by her mother’s selection as John McCain’s sassy sidekick. Forced to travel the country, modeling her baby bump, with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend at her side, Bristol found herself remade in her mother’s image. Sure, she’d tossed aside all the teachings about abstinence and purity and whatnot, but at least the part about not using contraception had kicked in, and, as she boasts on a recent cover of InTouch magazine, along side her mother, she’s glad she "chose life."
But it wasn’t enough for Bristol (or for her mother, anyway) to have her awkward fifteen minutes of fame and then fade back into Wasilla obscurity with the challenges of being a young single mother (albeit, a young single mother with a wealthy family, whose mother's lawyer helped her create her very own corporation to "provide lobbying, public relations, and political consulting services." Ah, every teen mother's dream.)
Last year, Bristol agreed to become an ambassador for the Candies Foundation.
"I am so happy to have this opportunity to work with The Candie's Foundation on spreading the message of teen pregnancy prevention. I feel that I could be a living example of the consequences of teen pregnancy." Palin added, "If I can prevent even one girl from getting pregnant, I will feel a sense of accomplishment."
Candies is the company that purveys hooker-wear for teens with mixed messages like its “Be Sexy Tees” line. (Get it? Be a sexy tease? Funny!) The tee shirts, which come in a range of sizes, from skin-tight to super skin-tight, say, “I’m sexy enough...to keep you waiting.” (Get it? She’s sexy, but since she’s a “good girl,” she won’t give it up. Except that, statistically speaking, she probably will.)
Candies wants to help fight teen pregnancy, but not in any way that might actually, you know, work. Its whole strategy is to tell teens to wait. Wear sexy clothes, but don’t have sex. Just don’t have sex. Its page of “tips” are all about sex -- not safe sex, mind, you, but how most teens who end up pregnant hadn’t really considered the consequences of sex. So, you see, just don’t do it, and then you won’t have that problem.
Naturally, Bristol is the perfect spokesperson for this campaign. Because even though she had sex, and we all know it, there’s no law that says she can’t pretend she didn’t have sex and that her vows of abstinence won’t be true in the future. And that’s exactly what she's promised -– before God and her mother and Oprah and everyone.
"I'm not going to have sex until I'm married. I can guarantee it."
And when pressed by Oprah, she insisted that her pledge is not unrealistic because, dang it, this time she means it.
Why does this matter? Why should anyone care what Bristol Palin has to say about the weather, let alone about sex?
Because Bristol Palin embodies the kind of counter-productive, over-politicized and downright stupid policies that have led to an increase in teen pregnancy rates for the first time in a decade.
The U.S. teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in more than a decade, reversing a long slide, a U.S. think tank reported on Tuesday.
...
"It's interesting to note that this flattening out of the rate and the increase in the rate is happening at the same time that we've seen substantial increases in funding for abstinence-only programs...We do know that when we saw the big decline in the '90s, that a lot of that decline was due to improved contraceptive use among teens."
After years of warning the Bush administration and social conservatives that abstinence-only education does not stop teens from having sex, nor does it prevent teen pregnancy, a new study by the Guttmacher Institute confirms what many have feared: that deliberately misinforming teens about sex can have serious consequences and that comprehensive sex education, in addition to the availability of contraception, is the best way to reduce teen pregnancy rates.
The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence—and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception—became increasingly widespread and teens’ use of contraceptives declined.
The study's authors were careful to point out that it is too soon to tell whether this reversal is merely a "blip" or part of a long-term increase.
When President Bush took office, he aggressively promoted abstinence-only education, investing more than a billion dollars in these programs during the course of his presidency. In 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman released a report that abstinence-only programs were actually teaching false and misleading information to teens about sex and contraception.
Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.
At the time, Waxman was criticized by proponents of abstinence-only education, including Joe S. McIlhaney Jr., who ran the institute that developed much of the abstinence-only "education" material, and Alma Golden, a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, who claimed Waxman's report was a "political document" that did a "disservice to our children." But it turns out that the real disservice to children was teaching them false information, denying them access to contraception, and insisting "just say no" was sound policy.
In 2004, a study by Columbia University found that even those teens who have taken chastity pledges -- promising to forgo sex until marriage -- don't actually abstain. A whopping 88 percent of teens who take such pledges still engage in premarital sex. That means that despite Bristol's promise to abstain (this time), the very strong likelihood is that she won't. And because she still refuses to learn about contraception or teach other teens that contraception, rather than empty promises, is the best way to prevent teen pregnancy, she's setting herself up for another big surprise. And she's doing her best to make sure other girls end up in the same position.
So while Bristol enjoys her fifteen minutes as the poster child for this-time-I-really-mean-it abstinence, collecting payments through her very own corporation, and helping her mother's political ambitions by continuing to spew the party line, other teenage girls who don't have her good fortune will find themselves in a world of trouble if they listen to her. And there are some rather harsh realities that Bristol, and her corporate sponsor, apparently want to overlook, to the very real detriment of all the young girls who want to believe that a sexy tee and "just say no" attitude will protect them.
It's a very good thing that our current president has cut government funding for abstinence-only education. But as long as celebrities continue to tell girls that all they have to do is "just say no," our culture has a long way to go in combating the outright ignorance and misinformation that leads to so many unplanned pregnancies. Because these stupid policies don't prevent teen sex; they just lead to stupid teen sex.
The bottom line? "Just say no" doesn't work, no matter how much Bristol Palin and the Candies Foundation and George W. Bush and all the social conservatives might wish it were so. Real, fact-based, comprehensive education does. Period.