ARTICLES
February 2003 ARTICLES
Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Mere Propaganda
State's "Great News" Not So Great at All
By George Neumayr
The state's teen birth rate has dropped below the national average for the first time since 1980, reported the California Department of Health Services in October. "We've kind of lagged behind the rest of the country and the national average," Anna Ramirez, chief of the California Office of Family Planning, said to the Associated Press. "This year is the first year we've had the great news."
But is it great news? Does a decrease in teen births mean a decrease in teen promiscuity, teen sexually transmitted diseases, teen abortion?
A dropping teen birth rate is a most misleading measure of progress. If it meant that teens were abstaining from sexual activity, the number would prove meaningful. But it doesn't. The state's "great news" actually masks more bad news, namely, that California teens are using abortion and contraceptive services with ever greater frequency.
Notice that the state is reporting not the number of teen pregnancies, but the number of live births from teen females aged 15-19. Roughly 45 out of every 1,000 teen females in California gave birth in 2001, totaling nearly 57,000 births. The national average is 46 births per 1,000 teen females. "California currently ranks 32nd in the nation" in teen births, according to the Associated Press.
Read these numbers with a "jaundiced eye," suggested Art Croney, executive director of the Committee On Moral Concerns in Sacramento. "The real questions are: How many teen pregnancies? How many teen abortions?" he said. Very conveniently the California Department of Health Services does not supply answers to these revealing questions. "The state doesn't collect that information. And that's how the state wants it, so the problem of promiscuity can continue. This report on the teen birth rate isn't worth the paper it is printed on," said Croney.
But for state officials seeking to entrench sex education programs more firmly in California's public schools, news of a falling teen birth rate holds immense political and propaganda value. Indeed, California state officials quickly pointed to news of the dropping teen birth rate as evidence of greater teen "responsibility." But what is the state's definition of responsibility?
"Teen responsibility" for the state does not mean that teens are behaving more virtuously. It simply means that they are showing more utilitarian efficiency in containing the visible consequences of their sins. "The state is telling teens if you have sex, use contraceptives. If you have pregnancies, get an abortion," said Karen Holgate, director of policy for the Capitol Resource Institute. Holgate said the state's announcement of the dropping teen birth rate is an attempt to drive that philosophy deeper into the schools. "This is all for the purposes of propaganda and lobbying to say, 'look our programs are working,'" she said.
And mainstream journalists are more than happy to help state officials orchestrate this propaganda charade. In the Associated Press report on the dropping teen birth rate in California, the state government's definition of sexual responsibility isn't even questioned: "Officials attribute the decline to the state's media campaign, which encourages sexual responsibility among teenagers and educates them about their options." The Associated Press also accords Kathy Kneer, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the status of an authority on the effectiveness of contraceptive-centered sex education. She told the unquestioning Associated Press reporter that the contraceptive "approach is more effective than the Bush administration's focus on the practice of abstinence. 'That probably hasn't happened since Adam and Eve,'" she said.
The reporter continued: "California's programs encourage male involvement in preventing unplanned pregnancy and absentee fatherhood, access to family health services and parent-teen communication, Kneer said. For every dollar spent on these prevention services, she said, the state saves $4.48 on unplanned pregnancies." How would Kneer know this? Kneer's claim "has to be bogus," said Jan Carroll, a legislative analyst for the California Prolife Council. "Those numbers aren't reliable, because the numbers are always changing," she said. Kneer also claimed to the Associated Press that the teen birth rate does not reflect an increase in abortion. This is another claim beyond her knowledge, since the state doesn't collect that information. "She can't make that claim," said Croney. "There are no numbers" on teen abortion rate.
It is true that the state says that it is paying for fewer abortions for all females, teenaged and otherwise. But is that definitive proof of fewer teen abortions? "I don't know how you can know," said Jan Carroll. It is impossible to get the number of teen abortions, but it is clear to Carroll that "fewer live births does not necessarily mean fewer pregnancies." She noted that teens can use their parent's "private health insurance to get abortions" without their parent's consent. "Insurance companies will offer abortion and contraceptives services to teens without their patients' knowledge. And if a teen gets an abortion, the parents won't get the bill. They will ask parents to leave the room if they are talking to a teen," she said.
This may account for the anomaly of Marin County, arguably the most culturally liberal county in the state, boasting the lowest teen birth rate in the state at 12.9 births per thousand teen females. "The state may just be celebrating that more babies are being killed," said Carroll.
State officials of course do not want to credit abortion for the drop in teen births. That would poison their propaganda's power. But they show no such wariness about crediting contraceptives for the recent numbers. "Young people have gotten the message about acting responsibly," Grantland Johnson, secretary of the state's Health and Human Services Agency, told the press. "Acting responsibly" is the state's euphemism for using contraceptives.
"Throughout the state, nonprofit agencies have launched innovative programs to educate teens about sexual safety," reported the October 22 Sacramento Bee. "This year, one agency's condom cover art contest drew 200 entries. Ultimately, five designs were chosen and imprinted on small paper envelopes the size of a condom with information printed inside about sexually transmitted infections. 'It made the point,' said Margie Fites Siegle, chief executive officer of the California Family Health Council, a nonprofit agency that distributes federal funds to 68 programs throughout the state."
The state health department's sex education web site, itsuptome.org, gives teens information on "methods of birth control" and offers a program called "Family PACT" which promotes, among other things, "reproductive health" and a "healthy sex life." Family PACT, according to the web site, offers "complete and private family planning services" for Californians without insurance and even for Californians who "have insurance but need to keep family planning services confidential." Family PACT will help them with "pregnancy counseling," "sexual transmitted infections," "unplanned pregnancies." It will determine "which birth control is right for you" and ensure "a healthy baby when you are ready."
Is all of this "great news"? Is it great news if 15-year-old boys are now using condoms expertly? And that young girls are getting birth control shots from the state governor?
Governor Gray Davis' officials think so, "but they have a different definition of responsibility than parents," said Croney. "Behind this news is a human suffering catastrophe. We know that the promiscuity rate is going up because the sexually transmitted disease rate is increasing," he said. "Some of these sexually transmitted diseases are incurable and even deadly. We are not getting where we want to go when there are 500,000 cases of chlamydia a year in California." If success is measured by teen abstinence, the state is abjectly failing, said Croney.
Croney also observed that much of this teen sex "is not even legal." The state gives under-18 girls family planning services and then "sends them back to their rapists," he said.
The state's pro-contraceptive message is only succeeding in encouraging more teen sex activity, and the state's sex educators are "not teaching the kids that condoms don't stop sexually transmitted diseases," said Carroll.
"I'm waiting for a teen to sue the state for telling them contraceptives were safe -- and then they get a sexually transmitted disease," said Holgate. Her group, the Capital Resource Institute, has lobbied the state to require that condom makers place a warning on their product similar to the one on cigarettes. The Democrat-dominated legislature balked at this idea, because, as one legislator put it, that might discourage young people "from using them." Holgate finds the state's opposition to abstinence-only sex education mystifying: "When did teenagers change biologically? If people of an older generation were able to say no, why can't teens say no now? The answer is that our culture no longer asks them to say no."
One culture which still appears to tell teens to say no is Asian culture. Asian-American parents are more interested in seeing to it that their children learn about calculus than condoms. Not surprisingly, Asian-American teens in California have the lowest birth rate at 15.6 births per 1000 teen females. "Asian-Americans don't fall for this balderdash" from sex educators, said Croney. "They are good people with strong families."
Meanwhile, the ethnic groups that get the most attention from the state government are producing the highest birth rates. "When broken down by ethnicity, the birth rate remains the highest among Hispanic teens, with 86.2 births per thousand. African American teens have the next highest birth rate, with 53.3," the Associated Press reported.
"The state is not addressing the real issues," said Holgate. "It should be telling teens, yes you can say no to premarital sex and here are the reasons. We are being dishonest if we are not telling them the truth about the fearful consequences of premarital sex." Holgate is also troubled by an assumption underlying the state's teen birth figure, namely, that a teen birth is worse than a teen abortion. A teen who gives birth to a child is being irresponsible? Asked Holgate. But a teen who kills the child is responsible? The issue should be, said Holgate, "what's best for the baby? It's about the baby."
Croney noted another curious element in the state's teen birth figure: it includes eighteen and nineteen year olds. Are they "teens"? he asked. No, but it is useful to stretch the teen age limit to include them, because Californians that age aren't getting married and are thus less likely to have babies. By counting them as "teens," the state makes the teen birth rate look better than it is. "There is a trend of not getting married at that age," said Croney. "The state has no business including eighteen and nineteen year olds in these numbers."
The teen birth rate "would be worse," according to Croney, without the incremental growth of abstinence programs and home schooling in recent years. "They are the brakes on a truck going down the hill. Because of them it might crash at 60 miles per hour instead of 90 miles per hour," he said.
Where contraceptives and abortion create more problems than they solve, abstinence poses no problems at all, said Carrol. "As Rush Limbaugh says, abstinence works every time it is tried."