Today’s opening of the Idaho Legislature comes with the customary sense of optimism and hope that this winter will bring new protections for preborn children. Idaho Chooses Life will once again focus our attention on creating an unambiguous right to choose life. But more on our anti-coercion legislation later.

Today, we’d like to preview another issue certain to be at the forefront of debate.
Planned Parenthood and Company have plans for us as well. We are expecting they will attempt to create a new coercion statute of their own: this one forcing pharmacists, doctors and hospitals to dispense the “Morning After Pill” – regardless of scientific or moral evidence that it often works as an abortion-causing drug. This heavy-handed initiative will seek to strip medical professionals of their right to refuse to participate in ending life, often referred to as the “conscience clause”.

We also expect these same forces to make a concerted assault on abstinence education programs in Idaho. The groundwork was laid by Rep. Anne Pasley-Stuart in a Statesman Opinion piece a week or so ago.

This effort to indoctrinate our children in the culture of birth control will find some willing allies in the Idaho Legislature – despite two generations’ worth of experience demonstrating that “educating” children in matters of sexuality produces sexualized children. And that produces the exact set of outcomes policy makers are ostensibly seeking to avoid.

Teaching children all about sexual behavior, including every known variant, and expecting they will not pursue their own research projects is as silly and counter-intuitive as showing a child how to start the mini-van, leaving him the keys and expecting, with a straight face, that nothing harmful will happen while we’re at the mall.

The evidence of Planned Parenthood’s failure to prevent premature sexual activity is overwhelming.

A recent story from England (The London Telegraph; 01.03.08) provides us with yet more such facts. Despite a massive increase in government spending on birth control programs aimed at children in the past several years, underage pregnancies increased by 4%, with an even higher rate of increase among girls under 16.

The article quotes Dr. David Paton, an economist at Nottingham University Business School:
“There has been a tendency for the Government’s teenage pregnancy strategy to focus on schemes where teenagers can get the morning-after-pill or other forms of family planning at school or clinics. The danger with this sort of approach is that it can lead to an increase in risky sexual behavior amongst some young people. There is now overwhelming evidence that such schemes are simply not effective in cutting teenage pregnancy rates.”