Exploiting teens, pawns in the sexual revolution.

The FDA is making the drug Plan B available to 15 year olds over the counter.  

In a surprise twist to the decade-plus effort to ease access to morning-after pills, the government is lowering the age limit to 15 for one brand - Plan B One-Step - and will let it be sold over the counter.

Today, Plan B and its generic competition are sold behind pharmacy counters, and people must prove they're 17 or older to buy the emergency contraception without a prescription. A federal judge had ordered an end to those sales restrictions by next Monday.

But Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a different approach: Plan B could sit on drugstore shelves next to condoms, spermicides or other women's health products - but to make the purchase, buyers must prove they're 15 or older at the cash register.

This is of course outrageous and another example of the bitter fruit of the sexual revolution.  Teens are pawns in this sexual revolution.  They receive no wisdom from the broader culture and our cultural elites on the nature and purpose of sex other than do whatever they want.  Then they're told to avoid one of the consequences of their sexual activity a possible pregnancy.  They of course can still contract sexually transmitted disease and bear the emotional and inner scars of sex outside of a committed, lifelong married relationship.  A form of child abuse and exploitation.

No surprise: Study links sex on TV to teen pregnancies

A study by the Rand Corporation says there's link between teenagers watching sex on TV with pregnancy.

The RAND Corp. study is the first of its kind to identify a link between teenagers’ exposure to sexual content on TV and teen pregnancies. The study, released Monday and published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that teens exposed to high levels of sexual content on television were twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy in the following three years as teens with limited exposure.

The study’s authors are quick to point out that the factors leading to teen pregnancies are varied and complex — but they say it’s important for parents, teachers and pediatricians to understand that TV can be one of them.

“We were surprised to find this link,” said Anita Chandra, the study’s lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. “But teens spend a good amount of their time watching television — an average of three hours a day — and we don’t know a lot about its impact on their health decisions …

“We don’t think that [TV] is necessarily more significant than some of the family and neighborhood factors that can lead to teen pregnancies. But even when we removed all the other factors, we still saw a compelling link between a high exposure to sexual content on television and teen pregnancies.”

In the debate over pornography and obscenity laws, opponents argue there's no linkage with the sexual abuse of women and other social problems resulting from out of control sex. I've always found these arguments to defy common sense. If advertisers spend millions and billions of dollars for 30 second ads or print ads in newspapers to influence behavior then why should we assume there's no linkage between sexually violent and other forms of pornography with such social problems as rape, abuse and promiscuity.

Now there's evidence suggesting that sexual messages and scenes on television impact teenagers. Again common sense would say there's a linkage between sex on TV and teen pregnancies.

What should be done about it? Of course parents need to teach and train their kids to be discerning TV viewers, yet that doesn't go far enough. Because sexually explicit material is so ubiquitous and pervasive in society and impacting not just on teenagers but adults, it's appropriate for standards to be implemented regarding acceptable and unacceptable content. Exactly what was done for so many years on television and the movies.

Of course, that's unacceptable with the anything goes mentality of so many in society.

What's the response of the National Association of Broadcasting? They released a statement saying:

Though NAB has not had a chance to review the report, it’s worth noting that broadcasters encourage parents and caregivers to use the V-chip and other program blocking technologies that would screen out shows that are inappropriate for children. We would also point out that broadcast television is generally far less explicit than programming found on cable, satellite and on the Internet.”

In other words, they don't want any further restrictions or self police the content and messaging on the network programs.

I think sex saturated messages are a form of cultural pollution which harms people in just as real ways as environmental pollution. It damages and destroys lives and relationships. Just ask a family or a teenager what the impact of an unplanned, out of wedlock teen pregnancy had on their lives.

Yet in today's society, anything hinting at moral standards is immediately ignored or dismissed. We as people and a society are poorer as a result.

Women still getting pregnant after using birth control. What's that say about contracting STDs?

A British abortion company acknowledged that over half of women who have an unplanned pregnancy were using birth control at the time they became pregnancy. According to a lifesites.com story, "Some 43 percent were on oral contraceptives when the pregnancy occurred and another 27 percent reportedly used a condom at the time."

Now if there's such a terrible success rate for contraceptives for preventing pregnancies which can occur only a few days each month, what does that suggest about the effectiveness of contraceptives, in this case condoms, in preventing the spread of STDs which can be spread any time of the month? Not much. Yet that's what the family planning and comprehensive sex education folks keep pushing.

Eventually common sense will come into play but it takes a long time when people are driven by ideology not the realities of the situation. The only reasonable, common sense approach to preventing unwanted pregnancies and STDs among our young people is a clear abstinence message.