Paisley Rose said:
When we adopted the wait was only seven years. Now it is more like 14 or 15 years to wait to adopt. There is simply not enough children to adopt... the OP is totally off the beam. There are even more infertile couples waiting to adopt now than it was 20 years ago. Blame abortion on this fact the wait is so long.
This makes me sad. There are plenty of children who need homes; the foster care system is full of them. But, most of them are over 2, many of them aren't white, and a good number of them have a disability of some kind.
This is partly why I see so much dishonesty in the anti-legal abortion movement. Honestly, I think a big part of the drive behind it is the desire to create a large pool of adoptable white babies. If we can get more pregnant white teens to give up their babies, then there will be a big pool of healthy white babies for infertile couples, some of whom seem to believe that they are "owed" a baby (although obviously not all have that attitude). That's just sad and wrong.
The idea that there are huge numbers of 12-year-old kids having sex is just flat-out wrong, and we should be saddened when any 12-year-old child has sex, not shocked or offended, because nearly all kids who engage in sexual activity that young have backgrounds of sexual violence or other types of serious family dysfunction. The way to stop 12-year-old kids from having sex is not to tell them not to have it, but to make sure that kids are treated well when they are kids.
When we are talking about 15 and 16 year olds, that's a different story. You don't need to come from a messed-up family to have sex at 16. But, the fact is that pregnancies CAN be prevented by correct, regular condom use, as well as by other birth control methods. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful comprehensive sex ed class when I was in 9th grade. It was several years before I had sex, but the stuff we learned stayed with me. Once I began having sex I never engaged in risky behaviors. I had sex with one long-term boyfriend and then my husband (back when he was my long-term boyfriend), and with both of them I was a diligent user of birth control, and I generally used two methods at a time. I never got pregnant, until my husband and I began trying to.
When I was a senior, our school implemented an abstinence-only curriculum, and we got a wonderful sex ed program that consisted of our teacher refusing to answer anyone's questions, a video starring Kirk Cameron telling us not to have sex, and a school assembly that told us that condoms don't work, leading many of the sexually-active males to begin refusing to use condoms when they had sex with their girlfriends.
Hmm, which one was more effective?
I don't know why we don't connect the fact that we have the highest abortion rate in the industrialized world with the fact that we also have the most puritanical views of sex, but we don't.
