On Womens Health, Trump Is Even Dumber Than We Thought
On Women’s Health, Trump Is Even Dumber Than We Thought
A leaked memo shows that Team Trump wants American women to go back to relying on total abstinence or the rhythm method to prevent pregnancies.
Erin Gloria Ryan
10.19.17 10:45 PM ET
Even before he added Mike Pence to his ticket, we already knew that the Donald Trump was unprincipled-to-wacky when it came to his stances on women’s sexual health. Now, thanks to a leaked administration wish list, we know a little more about Team Trump’s beliefs and archaic views on women’s reproductive health.
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Title X funding, which helps poor women afford contraception, would be slashed in half if Team Trump gets its way. Money would be diverted from sex education that emphasizes “risk reduction” and instead flow toward “sexual risk avoidance,” which is another term for “abstinence-only education.” Abstinence-only education doesn’t work. A report published this year declared the practice both “ineffective and unethical.”
The Title X money could also be diverted into childcare programs, or fertility awareness education. Women who want to be on birth control do not want childcare programs. They want to not be pregnant. That’s why they’re on birth control. They also would not like to learn about “fertility awareness,” a form of birth control that is much less effective than other, better forms of birth control the Trump administration would like us to pretend have not been invented.
For how stupid it is to promote “fertility awareness” over real contraception, let’s consider a theoretical model of car. Let’s say this car was, for 75 percent of the people who drove it, perfectly safe. But let’s say that for 25 percent of people who drove it for a year, the car would crash completely without warning and its driver would require hospitalization to recover. Promoting that car over an alternative car that crashed for, say, 0.01 percent of people (that’s the fail rate for a hormonal IUD) is fucking insane. So would telling people who didn’t want to drive the crashing car to perhaps, rather than getting a safer vehicle, simply not drive at all. That’s the Trump administration’s stance on birth control.
According to the document, a federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy “needs to be defunded as it has not worked, there is no positive evidence and some negative evidence.” Teen pregnancy in the U.S. just reached its lowest point since records were initially kept. So have abortion rates. That means that teens are either having much less sex than they were before or are not getting pregnant in the first place. Experts believe that the drop in teen fertility and abortion rates is due to greater availability of long term birth control and comprehensive sex education. What the government has done to bring us to this point is absolutely effective.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/on-womens-health-trump-is-even-dumber-than-we-thought
= new reply since forum marked as read
There's no way he could be dumber than I thought.
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Mostly true