Life Links 2/8/10

Pro-choice intolerance is alive and well in Canada where the University of Victoria’s Student Society has taken away the official club status of their campus’ prolife group Youth Protecting Youth “after receiving a complaint that anti-abortion advocacy ‘inherently discriminates’ against women.”


In Nepal, a young man has admitted to killing his girlfriend because she wouldn’t get an abortion.

Dickson Malla, boyfriend of the deceased girl Shushila Sahani, owned up the murder before the police four days after detention.

Malla and Sahani were in a relationship for the past six months and Sahani had been pregnant lately. After being pregnant Sahani tried to convince Mall for marriage, while Malla tried to pressure her for abortion, according to the police.

I called her in the pretext of eloping Tuesday night and pressured her to abort, Malla said. I murdered her as she refused to do so.

It’s really interesting watching pro-choicers squirm through their attempts to reconcile their years of abstinence education bashing with the new study showing one abstinence education program working better than a comprehensive sex ed program at reducing sex among teens.

Jill Filipovic is the latest case. Less than two weeks ago she placed the blame of the rise in pregnancies among 18 and 19-year-olds solely at the feet of abstinence-only education. But now after years of attacking abstinence education, it appears Jill was only opposed to abstinence-until-marriage programs.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I never recall Jill posting anything about how abstinence-only-education could work if it wasn’t abstinence-until-marriage-education. Instead, I recall numerous over-generalized comments which attacked any abstinence-only-education and lumped every kind of abstinence education together as bible-thumping moralizing (just like her recent column which assumes every abstinence-until-marriage program amounts teaches “condoms don't work and premarital sex is immoral” ).

Jill thinks the successful abstinence-only program “was exactly what the abstinence portion of a good comprehensive sex-ed class would look like. And it adds to the body of evidence that medically accurate, non-shaming sexual health education is the best and most effective kind of sex ed out there.”

Except that the abstinence-only program wasn’t a sex ed program. Students were less likely to have sex if they were in the abstinence-only program as opposed to the comprehensive program. Jill still seems to be having a hard time accepting the results of the study which show abstinence-only working better among some children than comprehensive program.