catherinewho:

halloweenuiq:

imagine that you have a four year old and a really beautiful giant chocolate cake

and you put the cake in front of the kid and that’s it you dont give her any plates or any utensils you just sort of set the cake down in front of the kid and then tell her not to eat it 

and the reason you tell her not to eat it is because she’ll get messy or she’ll eat too much and get sick but instead of telling her that you just sort of look at her and then go ‘yeah’ and walk away and leave her to her own devices

and then obviously the minute you walk out of the room she’s begins that cake i mean come on it’s chocolate and beautiful and yeah you told her not to eat it but you know what fuck that noise it’s a perfectly good cake why not

so she digs in but you didnt give her anything just the cake ( and what a beautiful cake it is ) so she just sort of digs in with her hands and she gets it everywhere and then eventually she’s eaten so much that she gets sick and you come back in a couple of minutes later and she’s there sprawled on her chair with cake all over her face and floor and feeling like she’s going to vomit and you shake your head at that four year old and go ‘i did all i could this is all her fault now’

that’s abstinence-only sex education

And this is a great metaphor because it also explains why sex education leads to higher rates of abstinence

If you just put cake in front of kids and go “cake is BAD FOR YOU DON’T EAT IT”, well of course they’re gonna eat it

But if you explain that it’s important to eat cake in moderation with a healthy spectrum of foods or else it can make them sick and give them forks and knives and lessons on the four food groups and the food pyramid and remind them that if they’re not ready to exert the kind of self-control that cake requires it’s okay to eat their vegetables now and have cake for dessert later because really cake is always delicious, then a hell of a lot more of them will make the informed decision not to eat cake right now

(Source: senuiq)

candyandcusswords:

In an exercise entitled “A Rose with No Petals,” the teacher is told to “hold up a beautiful rose.”  Students are then told to pass the rose around the room with each student removing a petal.  When the rose no longer has petals, the teacher must “share that the rose represents someone who participates in casual sex.  Each time a sexually active person gives that most personal part of himself or herself away, that person can lose a sense of personal value and worth.  It all comes down to self-respect.”

Choosing the Best PATH, Leader Guide, p. 7

 

What in the ever-living fuck, our government PAYS PEOPLE to TEACH THIS. TO CHILDREN.

ohfortheloveofsagan:

ARTICLE FOUND HERE

This post was originally written on January 21, 2011 to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision to legalize abortion in the United States. To honor Roe, and to honor the groups, practitioners, nurses, staff, and volunteers who have dedicated their lives to providing reproductive health care, we’re debunking some common abortion myths.

 ABORTION MYTHS:

1.  Emergency Contraception (EC) is an abortifacient.  Despite what Nick Cannon said recently, emergency contraception does not cause an abortion. EC prevents pregnancy, while the abortion pill (mifepristone) terminates an existing pregnancy. Check out NARAL’s great fact sheet for more info.
2. Women use abortion as a form of birth control – Actually, 54 percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Birth control methods fail, and inconsistent contraceptive use, as well as life changes, contribute to unplanned pregnancy. There is no research that states that women depend on or use abortion as a method of birth control.
3. Abortion causes post-traumatic stress and other mental health disorders. A 2008 report by the APA Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion concluded, “the best scientific evidence indicates that the relative risk of mental health problems among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy is no greater if they have an elective first-trimester abortion than if they deliver the pregnancy.”  This is also made clear through the fact that “postabortion traumatic stress syndrome” is not recognized by either the American Psychological Association (APA) or the American Psychiatric Association.
4. Women who have abortions will never be mothers. There’s a big misconception out there about who has abortions. Many believe there are two types of women in this world—those who have abortions and those who have children. The fact is 61% of women who have abortions already have one or more children.           
      
5. Abortion causes breast cancer. In 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine published the largest-scale study ever on this subject–with 1.5 million participants–which concluded that there is no independent link between abortion and breast cancer.
   
6. Making abortion illegal will stop women from having them. Abortion was prevalent in the United States long before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Because it was an illegal procedure, women who needed abortions had no choice but to obtain them from illegal practitioners. The “back-alley” abortion was dangerous and is listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women in 1930.
7. Pro-choice means pro-abortion. People who are pro-choice believe in the right for a woman to choose what happens to her body—whether that be an abortion, adoption, or carrying the pregnancy full-term. Being pro-choice means a lot of things and women and men who are pro-choice believe in choice for many reasons.
8. All Planned Parenthood does is abortions. As long as there is a need for abortion services, Planned Parenthood will continue to provide those services for women. We work diligently to decrease the need for abortions by providing access to family planning services, comprehensive sexuality education, programs that promote communication and good decision making skills, and strong advocacy on policy decisions that protects all of the above.
9. Women who have abortions can’t get pregnant, or will have a harder time conceiving.  Abortions performed in the first trimester pose virtually no long-term risk of such problems as infertility, ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion, congenital malformation, or preterm or low-birth-weight delivery. Most women have abortions in their first trimester.
10. Women having abortions are young, irresponsible women who can’t be bothered to take birth control.  Women of all ages have abortions for many reasons including financial, ability to provide care, the health of the fetus, the health of the pregnant woman, the lack of a co-parent, and many other legitimate reasons. Women of all reproductive ages have abortions – it has nothing to do with age or responsibility.