Where Abstinence-Only Education Gets You

It's quaint that Republicans believe you can actually stop teenagers from having sex by telling them not to have sex. It's fitting when the hopelessness of this strategy is demonstrated by one of their own daughters.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: withholding contraceptives and sexual education from teenagers won't stop them from having sex; it will just ensure that they impregnate each other more often. Conservative "family values" apparently include teens making big, round-wombed mistakes.

Sarah Palin has stated that she and her family are "proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby." As was astutely pointed out on the Daily Show this week, it is obscene that Palin is at once glad that her daughter made a good choice, while eager to take that same choice away from other women:




In response to the media attention Palin's daughter has received, Republicans have declared resentfully that this is a 'private' matter, and that the family should be left alone.

First of all, if this was a Democrat's daughter, they sure as hell wouldn't consider it 'private'. They would be bludgeoning Bristol with the same 'family values' that they're now, bizarrely, using to defend her.

Secondly, it's not a private matter. Bristol Palin is the prospective VP's daughter, and she is a walking rebuttal of her mother's naive, puritanical approach to sex education. It is both relevant and appropriate to ask how Sarah Palin proposes to convince the teens of America to abstain when she couldn't even convince her own daughter. Or why she thinks that her daughter's free choice to keep the baby should be forced upon the rest of America's women.