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My Twitter feed is burning up with feminist pro-choice pleas to sign a petition to make CBS pull the pro-life ad they've agreed to run during the Super Bowl. For those not aware of the controversy, the spot, sponsored by the Christian group Focus on the Family, features Pam Tebow talking about how doctors suggested she abort her fifth child because she became ill while she was pregnant on a missionary trip to the Philippines. Spoiler alert! She kept the kid, and he turned out to be mega-college-football star and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow.
I won't be signing the petition, even though I am pro-choice. It's not against FCC regulations for CBS to air the ad, and they've already said that they're not budging on the issue. I find it hard to believe that a 30-second TV spot is going to change someone's worldview, and the petition to get it yanked feels dangerously close to censorship. If pro-choicers believe this is such an important battleground, they should put their energy toward funding their own ad, rather than attempting to silence Focus on the Family (though that would be a phenomenal waste of money, just as the pro-life ad is). As far as I'm aware, commercials—even ones during the biggest sporting event of the year—do not have much sway over public policy.
Update: I was remiss in not mentioning that CBS has rejected commercials by groups with more liberal viewpoints in the past, which several readers brought to my attention. I still do not think the ad will sway viewers to be pro-life, but I do think it is clearly unfair.
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Emily, your post about employer benefits for housework reminds me of early feminists who attempted communal kitchens, housecleaning, and laundry services. We all need to eat dinner, the logic went, so why not outsource it to a pro and make it efficient for scores of women? Same with the laundry: Why do we all need to own machines and go through the task?
As for Sandra Tsing Loh’s desire for a “wife” who disburdens her the labor of housework and the dreary conversations over the “splitting of decision-making authority” with her partner: I found a solution! Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology have invented a robot maid named Mahru-Z. The four-foot tall fembot comes preprogrammed to “make toast, pick up stray objects, and load and operate a washing machine.”
Best of all for Tsing Loh, Mahru-Z is relatively autonomous. “It can navigate the house without any direction or oversight from its owner, and it can perform certain chores without having to be told.” Since Tsing Loh is annoyed by the splitting of decision-making authority (and, for reasons beyond logic, can't even propose that a living maid might solve her problems), Mahru-Z can provides the ultimate in domestic bliss: All of Tsing Loh's domestic needs can be met without her having to communicate them—indeed, without her having to self-analyze and enumerate them to her partner or to herself. Yes, Mahru-Z will usher in the calm of unquestioned authority into the Tsing Loh household. Gratitude will gush forth, domestic bliss will be restored.
Screenshot of Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons via Cartoon Network.
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Tablet Magazine's Marjorie Ingall has created a brilliant parody of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I grew up on: Planet of the Helicopter Parents. The art and the dead-on language sucked me right back to sixth grade, and I couldn't resist clicking my way through to find every ending. I'm proud to say that despite choosing to serve Dunkin Munchkins for snack, I still got anointed as "the best parent ever."
Correction, Jan. 26, 2010: This post originally misidentified Tablet Magazine as the Tablet.
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Abstinence-only programs (especially the ones that claim condoms don't work) are probably a large factor in the overall rise in teen pregnancy, but I think you're right to look at the exceptions to the overall trends, Jessica. Regional differences in teen pregnancy rates can be chalked up to a number of variables, and the official school curriculum is only one of them. The differences you note between Arizona and North Dakota can probably be explained in large part by religion's influence on the culture in those states.
One aspect of sex education that doesn't get much attention is the role that religion plays. Or, rather, it does, but the mainstream media mostly focuses on the Christians whom they assume all walk in lockstep on reproductive rights. But while this hostility to sexual health and information is very real in evangelical churches and the Catholic church, there are also a bunch of mainline Protestant churches that have a health-oriented approach to sexuality. I know that the best sex education I received as a teenager was through a friend's Protestant youth group, which had a two-day program that assumed we would be sexually active before marriage and that contraception and STD prevention were important issues to us. And when I think of no-nonsense Protestants with a Midwestern, commonsense approach to life, I think of Lutherans, who are the dominant religious group of North Dakota. According to Mark Regnerus' research into the sex lives and religion of American teenagers, mainline Protestants like Lutherans are only just behind atheists and Jews in terms of delaying intercourse, probably by substituting oral sex and "outercourse" to avoid STDs and pregnancy. Between putting it off longer and being more hip to contraception, these groups predictably would have lower pregnancy rates.
Arizona's biggest religion is Catholicism—a religion that gets an A+ in the art of shaming people over sexuality and discouraging contraceptive use. Clearly, the issue of where kids are getting their messages about sexuality and contraception is very complicated indeed, but what is not complicated is that the content of those messages seems to have a dramatic influence on behavior. Kids who believe they shouldn't be ashamed of having a sexuality and who are educated about contraception use tend to be more responsible about sex. Kids who believe sex is shameful and contraception is dangerous are more likely to tell themselves they won't have sex, and then capitulate in a moment of passion, telling themselves that at least they aren't the kind of sluts who carry condoms. Frankly, the messages that kids get from church, friends, and family probably have a lot more power than what they get from school.
That doesn't mean abstinence-only education isn't dangerous, of course. In a lot of places, abstinence-only serves to reinforce the larger cultural messages kids receive about how they should be ashamed of their sexuality and furitive and irresponsible in their experimentation. It's just that it's one factor among many.
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In theory, the Supreme Court’s profoundly plutocratic ruling in Citizens United v. FEC upends a century of campaign finance reform and overturns dozens of state laws. But in practice, since corporations are loath to alienate customers and shareholders with political attack ads, the decision may have scant effect on election outcomes.
So what’s the big deal then? For many of us on the left, what is most troubling about Citizens United—apart, of course, from its anti-democratic spirit and dubious legal justification—is that it reveals just how aggressively the Republican justices are willing to tear into decades-old precedent to pursue their own reactionary agenda, once they’ve got that crucial fifth vote. Reproductive rights advocates have begun sounding the alarm, arguing that this bold move does not bode well for Roe v. Wade. Like campaign finance reform, abortion has been a longtime bête noire of conservatives. With Kennedy firmly in their pack, some analysts say, Roberts and company will finally be free to deal the fatal blow to abortion rights by eviscerating Roe and its progeny.
I’m not so sure. With a few notorious exceptions, the Roberts Court has tread lightly on high-profile cases, narrowly interpreting the law to avoid important constitutional questions. While some ascribe this trend to Roberts’ feigned “umpire”-style minimalism, it may well be that Roberts et al. simply haven’t had enough votes to advance their ultraconservative jurisprudence. In Citizens United, lawyers shrewdly spun the issue as one of censorship, a clever overture to “swing” Justice Kennedy and his known soft spot for free speech. Thus far, however, Kennedy has given court watchers no indication that he is likely to supply abortion foes with that crucial fifth vote. He is, after all, one of the authors of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that kept the core of Roe intact.
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It's one of those ideas that seems blindingly obvious—if you want kids to eat a healthy meal, send them out to play first. Hungry kids eat more of what's offered. But most schools do just the opposite, letting kids head out to recess the minute they're done with their food—a situation even the most rookie parent would recognize as primed for disaster. (How many times have you told your kids, "There's ice cream for dessert!" and had all of them put down their forks immediately and sing out "I'm done!"?)
The NYT reports that schools in New Jersey, Arizona, and Montana have switched to recess before lunch and found less wasted food, as well as more kids eating their fruits and vegetables and drinking their milk. Some teachers also report better behavior, both at lunch and in the classroom. Again, it seems obvious—hungry kids are ready to come in off the playground and sit down to eat. Recess before lunch looks like a no-cost change with academic and health benefits: a win-win.
But plenty of schools balk at change, and this is no exception. Fewer than 5 percent of schools hold recess before lunch, backed by feeble rationales: The kids would have to wash their hands before they ate! And go back for their lunches and take off their coats! Oh, the complexity and all the lost mittens! (And schools in low-income areas note that plenty of students show up at school without eating breakfast, but that's a separate problem, and one best addressed by offering breakfast, not by serving an early lunch.) Granted that any scheduling switch may require working out a few bugs, and maybe even expending some cash (one New Jersey school installed hand sanitizer dispensers in the lunch room). But it's still unbelievable that states like California (desperately juggling a deficit at last check) would include $500 million plus in the budget for physical-education programs to reduce obesity and not instantly leap on a relatively simple logistical change that could mean millions of kids eating the healthy food on offer, instead of ravenously hitting the vending machines an hour after throwing away lunch.
Photograph of kids eating lunch by Stockbyte/Getty Creative Images.
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The Guttmacher Institute released a study today that shows that the rates of both teen pregnancy and abortion were on the rise for the first time in over a decade in 2006. In a press release, Guttmacher senior public policy associate Heather Boonstra says that the increase "coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration." While all the research shows that abstinence-only education doesn't really keep kids from having sex, if you look at the state-by-state data, there isn't a strong correlation between abstinence-only ed and the rise in teen pregnancy.
As the new data from Guttmacher show [pdf], North Dakota has one of the lowest rates of teen pregnancy in the country—and teens are more likely to use condoms in North Dakota than in many other states. And yet, they have a state-funded abstinence-only education program. By contrast, Arizona, which has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, rejected federal funding for abstinence-only education.
The teen pregnancy rate was at a 30-year low in 2005, so a 3 percent overall rise in teen pregnancy for 2006 is not yet a call for alarm. What is notable is that blacks and Hispanics are becoming pregnant at much higher rates than white teens are. It seems that teen pregnancy prevention advocates should put their energy into targeting these groups in particular. As Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy tells the Washington Post, "Clearly, the nation's collective efforts to convince teens to postpone childbearing must be more creative and more intense." Something tells me that teen pregnancy prevention spokeslady Bristol Palin is not going to reach these demographics very well.
Photograph of pregnant woman by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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