A practical joke about pubes leads to teenage pregnancy?

Texas has open primaries. I've decided if I might actually get off my ass and vote for Paul this year, even though I think voting is completely pointless and stupid. But... I might feel like a vote for Paul is a way for me to register my dissatisfaction with the corporately owned toads on the rest of the ballot. I haven't decided.

i'm also making up a ton of campaign signs that say "nobody for president 2012". everyone should do the same. i want to see these fuckers everywhere.

btw, don't let the hype about perry fool you, everyone in texas FUCKING HATES HIM. he's the worst governor in history, and he's only in power because he is entirely funded bt big oil and gas and the evangelicals who've silently taken over all of our local elections in the last decade or so. seriously, i have no idea how he actually pulled off winning the R gubernatorial primary, other than voting is totally rigged. i do not know one single person who approves of him. luckily, the governor of texas doesn't actually have a whole lot of power. id say the primary is totally between him and romney. and id also say romney actually stands a chance against obama (because EVERYONE HATES rick perry). but then again, id also say it doesnt really matter who wins because theyre just 2 public faces of the same corporately owned and minted coin. theyre going to talk about how wonderful the economy in texas is! its kind of bullshit. we might have more jobs readily available than most states, but they're minimum wage jobs and rent (not property values, rental values) is skyrocketing because everyone is moving here rapidly. soooo you can't afford to rent an apartment with your fancy new low wage job so you have to come live on my couch for a while. we also have a regressive taxation system and a subsequent $27 billion budget gap, which we're making old people and poor people and young people pay for. oh and we have worse air quality than all the other 49 states AND puerto rico... AND we have the most uninsured people... and possibly one of the fastest growing drop out and teenage pregnancy rates... oooh and we teach our kids a batshit evangelical version of history, math and science. we also refuse to teach our kids about sex. so when they go off to college they have no idea how condoms work and think if you have unprotected sex you need to drink bleach afterwards.

also, all of the above horrible things i've said about texas..... all happened under consecutive bush-perry leadership.

everyone in texas mourns the death of ann richards on a daily basis. we're thinking of digging her corpse up and making it run for office next election.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'breasts, boobs, bewbs, breast ironing, teenage pregnanciesbbb, cameroonb' to 'breasts, boobs, bewbs, breast ironing, teenage pregnancies, cameroon' - edited by DerHasisttot

Apparently a deal was reached. Here's a DKos diary running down the changes.

For people allergic to the great orange devil, it includes:

• Annual and lifetime benefit caps are banned
  
• Insurance companies will be required to spend at least 80% of their revenue on medical costs (85% for large group/corporate plans)
  
• States may opt to ban abortion coverage from their state's exchange
  
• Public option is now a framework for privately run non-profit plans which can operate across state lines (but has to comply with the regulations in all client states simultaneously)
  
• People meeting certain income/cost requirements may be able to use exchanges, even if they have an employer plan available (big improvement, IMHO)
  
• A bribe to Ben Nelson, in the form of federal money to Nebraska's Medicaid program.
  
• Penalties for not carrying insurance are increased slightly for those making more than $37,500/yr.
  
• Lots of tax breaks/extra funding for adoption and teenage pregnancy programs
  
• Dropped provisions which would have revoked health insurance companies' anti-trust exemption (not sure if that was for Nelson or Lieberman, maybe some Republicans could offer that as an amendment *guffaw*)
  
• Most everything else like subsidy levels, bans on denials for preexisting conditions and recissions are still in place.
  

>> ^quantumushroom:
I have a better idea to keep kids from fcuking, or at least have them think twice: end all welfare payments, "reduced price" welfare food and "free" childcare for anyone unmarried, under the age of 25. No more society having to foot the bill for bastards. Shouldn't you arrogant atheists be a little more supportive of personal responsibility, since, after all, you're the Ultimate Morality, not any kind of religious or moral teachings?


Did you miss the part where she puts forward that Sex Ed might decrease the rate of unwanted pregnancies? There by reducing the need for government assistance in teenage pregnancies, among other things?

Socialized medicine sucks.

The US Postmaster General is now weeping to Congress that the PO has "run out of money". The USPO is a government-monopoly that claims it can no longer deliver the mail 6 days a week and wants to cut back.

Are American liberals now demanding Post Office-quality bureaucracies run the 14% of the US economy health care represents? Do they want FEMA-quality bureaucrats deciding whether your heart operation is in the budget?

The following is from a 1992 article about Canadian health care. How much worse it is today?

"Canada has had socialized medicine for 20 years, and the same pattern of deteriorating facilities, overburdened doctors, and long hospital waiting lists is clear. A quarter of a million Canadians (out of a population of only 26 million) are now on waiting lists for surgery. The average waiting period for elective surgery is four years. Women wait up to five months for Pap smears and eight months for mammograms. Since 1987, the entire country spent less money on hospital improvements than the city of Washington, D.C., which has a population of only 618,000. As a result, sophisticated diagnostic equipment is scarce in Canada and growing scarcer. There are more MRIs (magnetic resonance imagers) in Washington State, which has a population of 4.6 million, than in all of Canada, which has a population of 26 million.

"In Canada, as in Britain under socialized medicine, patients are denied care, forced to cope with increasingly antiquated hospitals and equipment, and can die while waiting for treatment. Canada controls health care costs the same way Britain and Russia do: by denying modern treatment to the sick and letting the severely ill and old die.

"Despite standards far below those of the United States, when variables such as America’s higher crime and teenage pregnancy rates are factored out, and when concealed government overhead costs are factored in, Canada spends as high a percentage of its GNP on health care as the United States. Today a growing chorus of Canadians, including many former champions of socialized medicine, are calling for return to a market-based system."

i can also stretch the skin on my stomach to distended lengths, thanks to a not so rare condition called teenage pregnancy.

Ahh, I thought his comment was pretty amusing, but anyway. I did think it was biased yeah, but that was the whole point. This wasn't a real debate for people to take one side or the other, it was a pro contraception ad. Yes, there should be free condoms for everyone, over here if you go get yourself checked out regularly you can most always grab yourself a big bag of free johnnies, I guess that's the good old NHS for ya though.

I understand where you're coming from here GeeSuss, but in my mind personal relationship education, is just as important as academic education. We don't put nearly enough value on this, we just expect our kids to know and understand about love, sex and the relationship between the two. And the subject is undeniably complicated. So we don't do anything at all about it and look what happens. Teenage pregnancies, massively high STI problem, not just in adults and also the life expectancy of interpersonal relationships has decreased, divorce rates are through the roof and being single is still not a preferred way of existing. Clearly leaving everything to chance isn't working, is it

I suppose you're right.

Mostly was thinking how nutso everyone went over Jamie Lynn Spears' teenage pregnancy, and I'm thinking "daughter of VP" is probably higher social status than the Spears family.

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:
In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
... kind of example this sets for the first family, and...

Aren't they, like, the 'second' family... potentially?

err... did i just read that the best way to raise your children is to ejaculate in front of them?

gorillaman you either made an exaggerated comment which you are now trying to dig yourself out of, or you are actually fucking insane.

you've seen no evidence that porn harms kids? oh boy. i guess there's no underage pregnancy ever resulting from exposure to porn. I guess you think if we all ejaculated in front of our kids, the problem of teenage pregnancy would disappear? Fucking hell. I am beginning to think we should find your address and call the police... but i guess you are just playing around and a little embarassed at your clumsy exaggeration. Right?

Uh swampy, jonny, did you read the articles that we linked to? From what it sounds like, students are getting examined by professionals. Again, I qoute to you, this time with key things in bold:


"At King Middle School, birth control prescriptions will be given after a student undergoes a physical exam by a physician or nurse practitioner, said Lisa Belanger, who oversees Portland’s student health centers.

Students treated at the centers must first get written parental permission, but under state law such treatment is confidential, and students decide for themselves whether to tell their parents about the services they receive."


And from an article @SunHerald.com

"School officials said five of the school's 510 students would have qualified for the birth control under the program last year.

O'Brien, whose district includes King Middle School, said the notion that young children can now easily get birth-control pills is flat wrong.

"They don't just have a giant punch bowl full of pills," he said,

The birth control will be given out only after extensive counseling, and no prepubescent children will get it, O'Brien said.

But Coyne said a physically mature, savvy 11-year-old could get the birth control once the permission slip to use the center is signed.

"I think she could navigate the system," he said.

Portland's three middle schools had seven pregnancies in the last five years, said Douglas Gardner, director of Portland's Health and Human Services Department. He said early reports of 17 pregnancies during the last four years were erroneous."


So, not only are the students getting examined by a trained professional (these are not being handed out like vitamins), but to even undergo the exam in the first place or use the medical center itself, the child needs to have parental permission. I'm guessing this would be in the form of a release waiver that is filled out at the beginning of each school year, similar to the normal safety/contact info/release waiver that is then kept on file in student records.

So, Swampy, in your case, you could always choose to not give that permission, and your daughter would not even be allowed to access the health center and instead rely upon the doctors you designate outside of school. And likely, there will be many parents in Maine who will follow that route, not just because of the access to birth control, but because I'm sure some parents can afford better health care for their kids or have children with special medical issues that they need to monitor. For everyone else though, especially kids from low income families, this health center sounds like a very good thing, not just because of the access to birth control, but also immunizations, examinations, and basic treatments... and might be way more than some of these kids would normally get, and in the case of the Portland school district, it sounds like they need this kind of setup.

Again from the article @SunHerald.com

"The King Middle School is among Portland's most diverse schools, with 31 languages spoken there and 28 percent of its students foreign-born. The school, located on the same peninsula as downtown Portland, draws from the islands in Casco Bay, wealthier neighborhoods overlooking the bay, and low-income triple deckers.

Fifty-four percent of the students are part of the federal free lunch program, which is an indicator of poverty.

Principal Michael McCarthy said the school had just one pregnancy last year, but students were reporting they were sexually active. The center has dispensed condoms since 2000, but because it could not prescribe birth-control pills, nurses referred the students to Planned Parenthood or Maine Medical Center.

"When they followed up, they found that in many cases, the kids weren't doing that," McCarthy said."

It sounds like an environment that would be tough enough for a young girl to grow and mature in, and having an early teenage pregnancy would likely be an extreme burden and only help to perpetuate the cycle of poverty in the area. Coupled with that is the high immigrant population, which means there are probably a lot of parents in the area that are not equipped to deal with the new 'American' environment (i.e.- probably considerably more sexualized in content than the culture of their homelands) that their children need the support to deal with. In light of these considerations, I think that the Portland school system is taking appropriate measures to ensure that their students get the fairest start on life possible, and don't end up at an early age 'stuck' in the environment they are now living in.

Also, as none of us can say for sure what the exact procedures are there, we can't really argue on sticking points like whether or not they are gathering medical history... although, given my own experiences with student health services on a collegiate level, I would like to think that if this place in Maine is being run by health care professionals of a similar caliber, that they would probably contact your child's primary physician for medical records/history... at least, that is what they do here.

I do like jonny's idea that parents should be subjected to the same sex-ed classes as their children, if only because, in a lot of cases anyway, parents might finally realize just how lacking the sex ed programs are in a good number of school systems, and take it upon themselves to either demand a change in curriculum, or better yet, open up a dialogue on the matter with their children.

It's a huge issue and one which can get people so riled up. Maybe we're a bit behind the times here in Australia, because I don't know of any school with a daycare attached, or a free contraceptive program in operation. Whether that means we are behind the times, either in terms of services or behavioural trends, I don't know.

Teenage pregnancy has been a big issue here for a long time, with scores of young unmarried mothers, but I have never heard of this happening in primary school. Not to say it's never happened, however.

I think public schools, like other public institutions, tend to cater to the lowest common denominator, so if contraception is needed for younger populations, then it's probably a good thing that kids have access to it somehow.

I would like to see such a program involve the parents, however, in whichever way works, without alienating parents from child or visa versa.

I would also like to think that as well as offering this, children were being educated about the risk of STDs, because the pill will not protect you from the plethora of nasties lurking in the loins.

Raven's right, the kids are having sex. I'm told that in high school these days that you're a freak if you aren't having sex. The Mr. and I decided to be proactive: I drove my teenage daughter to the doctor and told her I'd pay for whatever birth control she wanted if she and her doctor decided it was appropriate. Her friends know this and they talk to me. The kids may not tell you that they are...but they are. They're afraid to talk about it to the parents because they don't want to get 'grounded' or have thier cars/games/computers taken away. Most parents are in denial and just hope nothing happens.

School systems wouldn't try to deal with this if there weren't so many teenage pregnancies...several metro high schools here have daycares and I've got friends and family members who are raising accidental grandchildren. Not on my watch!