While I was in the waiting room at San Francisco General Hospital for my surgical consult, I caught wind of a very terrible daytime television show called The Doctors.
This particular episode was about sex in America and the current state of how people approach sex. I had multiple problems with this episode, not least of which was the fact that the rather excrable Ann Coulter was on. I shall break it down for you point by point.
When arguing about the rise of teen pregnancies, not ONCE did anyone mention the incredible damage that abstinence only education has done to this country's youth. Education on sex, how to prevent disease and pregnancy, and how to handle sexual situations is critical to decreasing these numbers, and yet all they could talk about was how people need to take better control of their kids and the teenagers need to take some responsibility for their actions. This is total bullshit, as the numbers bear out.
Ann Coulter started spewing random 'facts' about how 90% of people in jail were the product of single parent homes and how single parents are contributing to the breakdown of morals in this country. I was deeply proud of the doctor who pointed out that she was the product of a single parent household, and now she's an MD. If I'd been on that panel I would have said something like "This is hardly the fault of the person who sticks around and makes sure that the child is well taken care of. Those millions of couples who want to adopt don't exist. Ann, you have a long and sordid history of playing fast and loose with the facts, and I frankly cannot take any numbers you come up with out of your head seriously."
After Ann finally went away (thankfully) it became a show about slut-shaming. There was a pregnant 15 year old girl (was she really?) on who said that the condom broke. It's not nearly as common as people make it out to be. The whole point of the program from then on was "See? If you don't have sex you never have to deal with this."
It was all about scaring the crap out of kids in order to get them to never have sex. If they wanted to really help (I'm thinking about the gynecologist on the show who said some incredibly ignorant stuff) they would educate the kids: this is how birth control works, this is how condoms work, this is what the real risks are but lets talk in terms of statistics and how likely it is that you get diseases. Did they talk at all about the benefits of Gardisil and whether or not they should have it? Did they talk at all about Pap smears and pelvic exams and why they were a good idea? Nope. It was abstinence education all over again.
On a completely different note, I have a surgical date which thankfully does NOT involve me missing school. I am very very grateful for that.
I hope to finish my discussion of action potentials and hopefully look at the Dr. Oz show for juicy tidbits to debunk. Once I'm done with action potentials, I think I would like to talk a bit about imaging techniques and brain cancer/central nervous system tumors.
Yes, I'm back.
