Pitts believes there actually was a pact where the girls tried to get pregnant and "the mayor and the schools chief, faced with embarrassing international attention, are trying to cover their municipal backside by silencing and undermining the principal and the child-care provider."
He goes to say that the alleged pact isn't important but what's important is who he wants to blame for various problems in teen sexuality (like Gloucester's pregnancies, high STD rates and a recent rise in the teen birth rate).
So who is to blame?
You might have guessed it. President Bush and his administration's abstinence education policy.
After attacking abstinence-only education, Pitts concludes by writing:
Gloucester, Mass., is an aberration, but it might be an omen, too. And if it is, if these troubling numbers prove the leading edge of a new teen baby boom, we will have to answer many tough questions, but one won't be tough at all.
We already know where it started. We already know who the father is.
One slight problem, though. Massachusetts' Governor Deval Patrick decided the state would stop receiving funding for abstinence education in 2007.
Not to mention that "Gloucester public school students receive sex education during middle school and are required to take one health class during their freshman year of high school."
It's amazing how abstinence-only education is to blame for multiple and supposedly intentional pregnancies in a school district where it isn't even taught.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment