Reproductive Politics

From Kristen Luker, When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex-- and Sex Education-- Since the Sixties (18): In the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud famously thought that life was sex in disguise. A joke, a pun, a slip of the tongue, a symptom, were all silent expressions of forbidden wishes in nineteenth-centure Vienna, and the forbidden was very often the sexual. By looking at sex and sex education today, I want to argue the other side of that equation: that sex is life in disguise. When Americans talk about sex, we are simultaneously and covertly talking about all the things going on in our world outside of the bedroom. Gender, power, conflict, cooperation, religion, culture, the future, and even (bear with me) the global economy are there . . . This is a fundamental insight about reproductive politics. Luker is well equipped to identify and communicate it, as she made the same point regarding abortion in her 1984 book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood . Many reprodu

Apparently, having Planned Parenthood linked to your university research is not a good idea. An article in  Insidehighered.com  indicates that North Dakota State University bowed to political pressure in killing a $1.2 million federal grant to scientifically study comprehensive sex education programs-- in other words, sex education programs that would include information about contraception. Two NDSU professors won the grant after state government officials declined to apply for it: The professors, Brandy Randall and Molly Secor-Turner,   planned to use the three-year grant for a sexual education program for at-risk teens in the Fargo area, programming developed in partnership with the region’s Planned Parenthood office. North Dakota State's president froze the grant for legal review-- but telegraphed the eventual outcome, which would be to kill the grant-- after conservatives got wind of it and started complaining, arguing that it violated state law: The state’s code forbi

In late November of this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a policy statement on emergency contraception that is sure to be rejected outright by the pro-life community. Emergency contraception (EC) is just that-- various pharmacologic methods of preventing pregnancy up to 120 hours after unprotected or under-protected sex. Plan B and ella are two well-known brands of emergency contraceptives; there are three major chemical methods for achieving the desired result. As it is now, most states require that adolescents under the age of 17 get a doctor's prescription to obtain emergency contraception. Given that EC works best the earlier it is taken, the prescription requirement could delay its effective use, or prevent a teen from accessing it altogether. As a result, the AAP published its policy statement as part of an attempt to continue to lower the teen birth rate in the United States. Their major recommendations are "encourage" doctors to e

Legal change on contraception and sex education may be arriving in the Philippines, which has a birthrate almost double that of the United States: After years of discussion in the Philippine Congress, the House of Representatives finally decided in August  to end debate on a reproductive health bill  that would subsidize contraception and require sex education in the  Philippines , a country with one of the highest birthrates in Asia. If it passes in the House, which returned to session on Monday, the bill will also need to be approved by the Senate. (Source: The New York Times ) The reasons for teaching women and men the basics of human reproduction and making contraception free and available are hard to dispute. First, women should have more control over the timing and spacing of pregnancies as a matter of personal autonomy and dignity. Second, a basic tenet of international development is that poor countries do better economically and developmentally when birthrates go down. Low