Birth Control for Children

As some of you may have heard, a middle school in Maine recently passed a regulation that allows children as young as 11 years old to receive contraceptives. The children need parents permission to see the health center but, because state law says health concerns are confidential, parents won’t be notified if their children are receiving the birth control devices.

Personally, I think this is great. The kids are going to have sex and they are doing it earlier and earlier. Parents who complain about are simply burying their heads in the sand. It’s better that kids have the protection and not use it than do something and regret it later.

I have two daughters and I would have no problem with them having birth control. Regardless of whether I approve of it at their ages, I know they will do it and I’d rather they be on the pill than tell me they’re pregnant. My wife also approves of it; she said that if we didn’t home school, our kids would be on birth control right now, just to be safe.

It’s like the fight a decade or so ago about having sex education in schools. The prudes didn’t want it because it would encourage kids to have sex. Guess what? They’re going to have sex regardless of whether they have the knowledge; the human body knows exactly what to do. And when you’re a slave to your hormones during puberty and you have to chance to act on it, most people do.

I grew up in a state with a large Mormon population. They preach that sex is evil and all that Christian stuff. But most of the teen pregnancies were among Mormon girls because their parents didn’t teach them about sex. My wife went to a school where the youngest teen mother was either 11 or 13 (I forget which).

There have been reports online about how kids don’t think oral sex is “sex”, so they have no problem giving/receiving it. A few years ago there was a news report about a couple of Jr. High students that were caught doing oral sex on a school bus. And with the number of families with both parents working, kids have even more opportunities to “get it on” since they often come home before the parents get off work.

The kids will do it, whether or not the parents want them to. You might as well give them the tools to be safe than pretend it doesn’t happen. It’s like having a smoke detector in your house: you hope you’ll never need it but you want it there just in case.