Bristol Palin Speaking Out for Abstinence

Bristol Palin — Sarah Palin’s 19-year-old-daughter and unwed mother of 4-month-old Tripp — has been chosen as an Abstinence Ambassador for the Candies Foundation. She made the rounds of the morning shows, appeared at a town hall meeting for National Teen Pregnancy Awareness Day and declared herself committed to discouraging behavior that would leave other girls in the same predicament she finds herself in. “Regardless of what I did personally,” she told Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America, “abstinence is the only … 100% foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy.”
Hmm, I wonder if Mommy Sarah Palin had anything to do with this. “It doesn’t look good for a future presidential hopeful to have a daughter who had a child and did not marry the dad. They had to re-brand Bristol Palin so that she fits into the conservative base.” It was a mixed message, others charged: “Don’t have sex as a teenager, but if you do, you might end up a happy celebrity with this beautiful baby.” Life is much messier and all the odds were against them, and in a real sense it diminishes Bristol’s challenge, and her clear determination to meet it, to pretend otherwise. Only 4 in 10 teenage mothers finish high school; less than 2% of girls who have babies under 18 will finish college by the time they are 30; just waiting until 20 or 21 increases the odds fourfold. Two thirds of families of young unwed mothers are poor. When pregnant teens do marry, they are 50% more likely to get divorced than those who marry without being pregnant.
She was right back in February when she said it was “not realistic,” she is right now when she says practicing it is hard, and she’s right that it is much better and safer for kids to postpone having sex. She also advocates that kids who have sex should use contraception. This has always been the irony of the fight over sex education. The increased emphasis on abstinence in the past 15 years has been a factor in pushing back the age at which kids have their first sexual experience, reducing the number of partners they have and lowering both the teen abortion rates and pregnancy rates. The problem with Abstinence Only education was not the Abstinence, it was the ONLY. The most effective message is to encourage postponement of sexual activity while providing full and complete information on contraception, decision-making and disease prevention. Which is why the President’s just released budget ends funding for programs that restrict the discussion to abstinence alone.