Dammit, if young girls are going to have sex, they better get pregnant

Well, that seems to be the logic behind not making Plan B over-the-counter because young girls might use it. Anyway, here's a good article that doesn't hold back on some gugly facts about teenage sex and emergency contraception. Some good, sobering points. First of all she attacks an untruth that got kicked around during the debate, that one out of five girls between 11 and 14 have sex. Fact of the matter is that he could have gone ahead and said one out of five girls between 1 and 14 has had sex. Or maybe 98% of girls between 1 and 95 have had sex.

Earlier this month, the FDA's own sister agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published its latest Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report. According to the 2003 data, just 7 percent of today's adolescents have sexual intercourse before the age of 13. Among these, the vast majority are boys. For girls—the population Galson is talking about—the figure is much lower: The 2003 data show that only 4 percent of girls have sex before they are 13.
Although Galson could not say where he got his own data, it's likely he's echoing the well-known figure—cited by a number of research groups—that one in five teens has sex before his or her 15th birthday. In 1995, 19 percent of girls had sex at least once before they were 15, compared to 11 percent in 1988. Those figures are outdated, however: The National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy isolated the newer CDC data for ninth-graders and found that in this group (14-year-olds to 15-year-olds) sexual activity has declined, as it has in the under-13 group. The CDC figures also make clear that the sexual activity of an almost-15-year-old is very different from that of an 11-year-old or a 12-year old.

Well, perhaps you still think, well no matter how few young girls are having sex, they should still be having babies, the little sluts. Well, think again.

It's also important to remember that the younger the girl, the more likely sex is to be coercive, usually forced on her by an older partner. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, seven out of 10 girls who have sex before the age of 13 do so involuntarily.

If you consider that sobering fact, and you still think, old enough to get pregnant, old enough to be forced to have babies, think about this.

Childbirth, too, is a terrible thing for this age group. Young teen mothers are least likely to get prenatal care, most likely to deliver low birth-weight babies, and totally unprepared to be parents.

My guess is the people keen on stopping women from getting emergency contraception are prone to waxing romantic about "respecting life", aka, women nweed to wuv the wittle babies. Less romantic an image of course is the 12-year-old who has been raped and now has to go through pregnancy and childbirth, which is hard on a still-growing body,
because she couldn't get emergency contraception or an abortion.
It's a blatant lie to say that you are for the health of young teenage girls while knowing full well that maximizing the number of young teenagers who become pregnant is going to be the result of your actions. But conservatives learned a long time ago that scaring people into thinking that evil liberals are trying to turn your young daughter into a slut if all they need to do.
The idea was not to raise genuine concerns about girls with real problems. If they have to lie about it, it's because they know that if more people knew the truth--that a minority of religious conservatives are trying to keep them from having access to a drug that prevents pregnancy even after they have unprotected sex--they would be furious. So it was time to haul out one of their favorite brains-off bogeymen, the ubiquitous teenage slut.