Misbegotten health policies for our daughters

Birth control  and sex education does no good for teen-age girls who want to get pregnant. 

Girls know how to get pregnant.  Why do they choose to do so is the question.

In Planned Teen Parenthood, Daniel Moloney quotes research of sociologists who spent five years living in the same neighborhoods with poor unwed mothers.

While the poor women we interviewed saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve, they judged children to be a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.

Moloney points out that providing contraception to teenagers without their parental consent or notification not only is common practice at high schools  but totally counter-productive.

These girls need more parental involvement, not less. These young girls know how to have babies, so further sex ed isn’t needed. They want to have babies, so contraception is beside the point. The problem is that they think that they are ready to have babies, and they aren’t.

That’s where the parents should be stepping in, helping the girls to realize that they aren’t ready to be mothers...

Studies show that teens are less likely to have sex if they think their parents disapprove. But parents are often kept in the dark, thanks to misbegotten health care policies which view them as a threat to their daughter’s best interests.
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Our nation’s “experts” are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with teenage girls who want to be mothers. Indeed, laws designed to make contraceptives available to teenagers often make the problem worse.