A reader quotes another:
When pretty much every convenience store (at least in New York City) has a slew of condoms hanging behind the counter, there is no access? That any woman that has already had a child is ignorant of birth control? Come on. This reply was just another example of liberals treating people like idiots.
People are not ALL idiots, but when abstinence-only public sex ed insists that condoms are fallible and therefore only abstinence works, the relative abundance of condoms in convenience stores does not matter. I’d also point out that the vast majority of the American landscape is not New York City, and there are millions of sexually active teenagers and young men and women who do not have the easy access to condoms that our New Yorker enjoys. Maybe a small-town drugstore stocks condoms too, but can a young person buy them without worrying that Mom and Dad will hear from the druggist, who’s in their church (where birth control is demonized)? I love New York City, don’t get me wrong, but to generalize about the accessibility of ANYTHING from NYC to the rest of America is … idiotic.
Another adds, "Any prescription based birth control is expensive, and also difficult to access if you are uninsured or in a rural area or under 18." Another:
In the South, schools are frequently not allowed to teach about contraception, and when they are, parents are given advance warning and many withdraw their children from the sex ed classes rather than have them be educated. Birth control urban legends are legion, including, but hardly limited, to the idea that an aspirin inserted in the birth canal will prevent pregnancy (I've also heard coca cola because it is acidic, and soap because it will wash out the semen, amongst other similarly idiotic – these days weirdly mutated into the 'joke' that holding an aspirin between your knees will prevent pregnancy). When children-becoming-adolescents don't get official information from parents or teachers, they fall back on one another. I remember hearing the myth that you can't get pregnant on your first attempt. All these and more are still frequently circulated amongst teens all over the Western world (and while hardly an expert, I'd be surprised if the rest of the world cultures don't have similar legends amongst their teenaged population).
Another points to some stats:
The latest CDC survey (released January of this year) of teenagers ages 15 to 19 found that over half didn't use birth control and of those 31.4 percent believed that they couldn't get pregnant. Those teens who did get pregnant, as would be expected, were much less likely to use birth control.
Another takes a different tack:
I have to respond to this: "The root causes of generational fatherlessness and poverty are more about lack of comprehensive sex education in schools and access to health care, ie, birth control." Poverty doesn’t mean people don’t have the same wishes and dreams as people not living in poverty. Isn’t it entirely possible that some poor women have children because they are not immune from wanting children? Isn’t it possible that some poor women want children because they suspect they will never ever, have something that is unconditionally theirs and unconditionally loves them, besides a child? Isn’t it possible that some poor women have children because they were raised by a single mother and model what she did because THAT IS WHAT THEY KNOW? Isn’t it possible that some poor women feel they will never do anything as meaningful as raising another human being and they want that meaning and purpose in their lives?
By the way, single motherhood is not a plight reserved for the urban poor. It is a mainstream occurrence now.
To read the entire Dish thread on the hookup culture, go here.
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