One thing I’m getting used to is people censoring (or trying to censor) the speech of others and then claiming it’s not really censorship but something else: avoiding hurt feelings, obviating “hate speech” or so on.
A good example is a report in Yahoo News that the school board of Gilbert, Arizona (covering 39,000 students) has removed two pages from a biology textbook (Campbell Biology: Concepts and Connections) because those pages discuss birth control, including contraception and the morning-after pill. I believe the textbook is for high-school students, and it’s not clear whether the two pages have been physically removed from the book (I suspect they have, since the word “excised” is used), but this is in response to a legal group’s concerns that students might actually learn about how to have sex without the possibility of having babies. And that apparently violates a state law:
An Arizona law signed by Republican Governor Jan Brewer in 2012 says that taking into account “the state’s strong interest in promoting childbirth and adoption over elective abortion,” school programs must present those as the preferred options.
The alliance said the materials, which have been used in the district since 2006, present elective abortions as a viable option for students while making no mention of childbirth or adoption.
Now the news report is scanty, but it suggests not that the text promotes or even mentions abortion, but mentions the morning-after pill as a form of contraception. Most people know that that that pill doesn’t cause an abortion, but prevents an egg from being released, so a zygote isn’t even formed, much less implanted.
The opposition, of course, comes from conservative religious people, and that’s also mentioned in the news report (“Some conservative Christians believe life begins at the moment of conception”). Of course, there is also no “conception” with either birth-control pills or the morning-after pill.
It’s bad enough to try to keep this information from kids, but worse when you claim it’s not censorship:
“By redacting, we are not censoring,” board member Julie Smith told 12 News in Phoenix. “This school district does offer sexual education classes. If we were censoring, we would not offer anything on this topic whatsoever.”
My online definition defines “redact” as “censoring or obscuring (part of a text)”, so thats a distinction without a difference. And to say that there’s no censorship because, after all, they do teach sex education, is simply lying. They know what they’re doing; they’re just trying to pretend it’s not censorship. Ms. Smith, at least, needs to read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
h/t: Mark
Fortunately for the school board, there is no other way for kids to get this information.
The best way to prevent abortion is to promote the use of birth control. You have to be incredibly dense not to understand this simple fact. But that’s America’s Republican Party.
I don’t think it’s really about preventing abortion. It’s a conservative axiom that premarital sex is wrong, and girls who indulge in it must pay the consequences and be publicly shamed. So no birth control, and no abortion either.
That is also true.
Sex is wrong? Doesn’t that mean pleasure is wrong? What about eating? What about dedication? Now that’s a pleasure worth pursuing. Is that wrong? Why is pleasure a sin? I don’t get it.
The craziest thing about the TeaOP’s stance on abortion and contraception is that, by making it more difficult to get an abortion or to acquire birth control, they are increasing the future numbers of black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote Democratic! Just another example of how self-defeating stances MUST be taken to uphold religious dogma.
The numerous attempts to pass “personhood” bills around the country are a particularly insidious and sinister ploy; one that can, if successful, be legally extrapolated to the point where a woman could be prosecuted for murder for having an abortion, or possibly even just for using contraceptive methods!
Since 1/2 of all fertilized eggs fail to implant and are aborted, the notion that fertilization is the start of personhood means that god is the world’s greatest abortionist. Thus, put god in the dock charged with murder.
Not so much pleasure, more like anything that feels good…
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Really? They want to throw childbirth out there as a viable option for teens? Adoption, sure–if the teenager wishes to do so. Of course, the AZ Government wouldn’t think of aiding the mother through this process with healthcare or anything like that. Once again, George Carlin hit it on the head.
Babies are God’s Gift to rape victims and God’s Lesson to sluts, is basically how they work that one out.
It is the same sort of mind-set, watered down by modernity thank goodness, that justifies criminalising sex out of wedlock, FGM, stoning and child brides.
Geez. Why can’t they just stop at “God’s gift”? Something fishy about this whole thing. Are they jealous of the young and sexy? Or what?
I’d prefer it if they realised that another person’s contraceptive / child-bearing choices fell into the None Of Your Business category.
“Some conservative Christians believe life begins at the moment of conception”
…and sperm and egg cells aren’t alive? Life began billions of years ago.
You are, of course, right.
When Christians talk about “life beginning” what they really talking about is their fiction of ensoulment. They would no doubt deny that the egg and sperm are human life because those things haven’t been processed by God’s Ensoulment Machine (GEM™). They need to be combined in the GEM™ for Life® to exist.
Which, of course, means they are forcing their religious views on the students, which is unconstitutional.
We’ve managed to reduce the elective abortion rate in NZ by, wait for it, increasing sex education and availability of contraception for teens. GB James is right, and there’s proof.
We have proved the same in much of the US, The evidence, in the form of concrete results, is not something that is of much interest to religious conservatives.
To the religious, facts are irrelevant compared to the Truth. Granted, their Truth is entirely false, but still…
Yeah, this is kind of the same redefinition of abortion that happened with the Hobby Lobby case where they assert that contraception = abortion because they don’t understand that the morning after pill prevents ovulation and no one blinks.
I wonder to what extent there’s an assumption that ejaculation = conception, i.e. that Mommy is already pregnant (God willing) before Daddy falls asleep.
You mean to say the woman is not the fertile soil in which the man’s seed grows?
When I was in second grade, my parents started buying me books in the Life Science Library series. The set was considerably above second grade level, but my own reading level at the time was at least tenth grade. One of the titles, Growth covered human development, and included a photo essay with intrauterine pictures of a developing embryo/fetus. When my Catholic grade school got the same series of books, I immediately noticed that all of the pages with photos of or references to reproduction (including all the phetus fotos) and genitalia had been removed. I could have probably made a profit by charging other kids a fee for peeks at the forbidden pages, but I didn’t want my own copies to get treated similarly.
This was not supposed to be a reply to the comment above. The comment software must have gotten confused.
I remember those books. It was a big deal at the time that such in utero photos were not only technologically possible, but considered suitable for general publication.
A case could be made that they inspired the Starchild sequence in 2001 a few years later.
Italic fail. Sorry.
Anti-choicers like to call the morning after pill an “abortifacient” because they think it is tantamount to an abortion. Actually, they use the word because they think a big fancy word makes it sound like they have science on their side.
I’m happy to report that in Germany, we don’t have any state censorship at all, as guaranteed by §5 of the constitution.
I’m even more happy to report that we have a federal inspecting authority for writings liable to corrupt the young (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften) that ensures bad books will not get into the hands of the unsuspecting and vulnerable population.
Your last paragraph makes me a little nervous.
Technically, they can’t ban buying or selling books if you’re at least 18 years old. But they can ban any kind of advertisement, recensions, or any other way to make anyone know the book exists. And the authority has recently won a lawsuit that it does not need to tell anybody which books are banned. So if you know about the book, you are allowed to buy it, but you won’t know about it, because you’re not allowed to know about it. Joseph Heller would like that concept.
Germany also has a law against selling Nazi stuff, right? How does that work, since the Nazis did publish books …
Indeed.
There were several objections I had to the Hobby Lobby case, but the one that annoyed me the most was its reliance on the plaintiff’s “belief” that the morning after pill and IUDs are abortifacients. The science says they are not and the belief is wrong, so the case should have been dismissed on that point. It’s like the court allowing no pre-natal care be paid for because a plaintiff genuinely believes storks deliver babies.
SCOTUS has long been partisan, and that’s a bad thing for your country. As an outsider, I find it difficult to respect it.
As an insider I do, too.
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i actually live in the district and graduate from high school here 15 years ago. The reasoning they give for the censoring is that adoption and abstinence needs to be given preference over birth control off any kind. I luckily had a HS biology teacher that did not shy away from talking about sex education since it is a topic in biology. She didn’t talk about adoption nor abstinence, since one falls outside of biology and the other flys in the face of it.
This coming Tuesday we have the chance to regain 2 seats and the majority of the school board from the tea party backed candidates.
Good luck with that!
IME the fundies are far better at getting the voters out.
Good luck.
As always, the notion of virginity-only “sex education” promoting lack of knowledge and lack of birth control is directed primarily (if not exclusively)at girls. We all know that boys will sow their wild oats, and that’s OK. Only the girls they find to have sex with are penalized.
Those of us who are history buffs and genealogists are well aware of the fact that sex before marriage has always been around and, the occasional consequence of that for some girls has been pregnancy, childbirth and shame. I’d hazard a guess that most of us, if not all, had ancestresses throughout the generations who experienced this shame.
We have it in our power to ensure that virtually all children can be born into loving homes of mature individuals who can properly care for them. Those excessively conservative religious nuts who prevent education, contraception, etc. are responsible for whatever unloved, poorly cared for children born to teenagers. Unfortunately, they do not want to help financially with care of the mother or children. They should be ashamed.
Hear, hear!
I assume they are ripping out a page since the birth control stuff is only on a single page. Relevant text is below.
“Complete abstinence is the only totally effective method of birth control, but other methods are effective to varying degrees.”
It then discusses sterilization, tubal ligation, vasectomy, IUD, rhythm method, condoms, spermicides, and oral contraceptives. Then it talks EC (and errors in using the word ‘implantation’), and RU486, which Yahoo seems to confuse with EC.
“Certain drugs can prevent fertilization or implantation after unprotected intercourse. Birth control pills can be used in high doses as emergency contraception, also called morning after pills (MAPs). If taken within three days after intercourse, MAPs are about 75% effective at preventing pregnancy. Such treatments are available to people 15 and older, but MAPs should only be used in emergencies because they have significant side effects. If pregnancy has already occurred, the drug RU486 (mifepristone) can induce an abortion, the termination of a pregnancy in progress. RU486 must be taken within the first seven weeks of pregnancy. It must be provided by a healthcare professional, and it requires several visits to a medical facility because of risk of significant side effects, including cramping and bleeding.”
The reference to the Hobby Lobby supreme court case is right on cue here. Just turn this over to the supreme court and they will be tearing pages out of all the books.
Rachel Maddow show just had a bit on this and have announced a web site named ArizonaHonorsBiology.com they created that has the excised material. Hilite URL, right click, and select “Go to” to view. (Sorry – too lazy right now to do the HTML bit.)
Censoring a book with the wide world of sex on the internet at your disposal? yeah that’s really going to work.
Unsophisticated and myopic reaction is pretty much the norm with these losers. What century are these people in. It is time to grow up when the words sex, penis, vagina.. are all on the same page. The stuff of life, like water.
There are other casual factors for unwanted pregnancies other than the act e.g. a correlation with income inequality.
The Spirit Level. R Wilkinson and K Pickett
They need to open up and take in more of the outside view instead of keeping their legs and fingers crossed and hoping for the best.
Censoring in a first world country on something as basic as this topic? it is a failed strategy and thankfully it doesn’t go unnoticed.
If so, then this would be a clear case of scissorship.
35 years ago, despite its peculiar political fealty, Az. was a fairly progressive state. I wonder when the loonies took over and started preaching about Jesus and the Brown Threat. Glad I don’t live there anymore – I wouldn’t recognize the place. When Barry Goldwater starts to look like the pinnacle of sensibility you know you’re in the shit.
The irony is that removing birth control measures and promoting abstinence-only measures don’t even work on their own terms, since the evidence suggests that kind of move actually makes the problem worse. Keeping students ignorant of contraception is a strategy akin to the proverbial shooting of one’s own foot:
http://www.monbiot.com/2009/07/28/politically-transmitted-disease/
“A study published by the American Journal of Public Health found that 86% of the decline in adolescent pregnancies in the US between 1991 and 2003 was caused by better use of contraceptives(15). Reduced sexual activity caused the remainder, but this “ironically … appears to have preceded recent intensive efforts on the part of the US government to promote abstinence-only policies.” Since those recent intensive efforts began, sexual activity has increased.
“When Unicef compared teenage pregnancy rates in different parts of the world, it found that the Netherlands had the rich world’s lowest incidence – five births per 1000 girls – and the US had the highest: 53 per 1000(16). Unicef explained that the Dutch had “more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.” There was no “shame or embarrassment” about asking for help. In the US, however, “contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a ‘closed’ atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy.”
“Obama’s new budget aims to change all this, by investing in “evidence-based” education programmes(17). The conservatives have gone ballistic: evidence is the enemy. They still insist that American children should be deprived of sex education, lied to about contraception and maintained in a state of mediaevel ignorance. If their own children end up with syphilis or unwanted babies, that, it seems, is a price they will pay for preserving their beliefs. The denialogues are now loudly insisting that STDs and pregnancies have risen because Bush’s programme didn’t go far enough. The further it went, the worse these problems got.”
http://www.monbiot.com/2004/05/11/waging-war-with-the-virgin-soldiers/
“The catastrophe afflicting so many teenagers in Britain and America, in other words, has been caused not by liberal teachers, liberated parents, Marie Stopes International and the Guardian, but by George Bush, Ann Widdecombe and the Daily Mail. They campaign against early sex education, discourage access to contraceptives and agitate against the social inclusion (income equality, the welfare state) which offers young women better prospects than getting knocked up. Abstinence campaigns like the Silver Ring Thing do delay the onset of sexual activity, but when their victims are sucked into the cesspool (nearly all eventually are), they are around one third less likely to use contraceptives (according to a study by researchers at Columbia University), as they are not “prepared for an experience that they have promised to forgo.”14 The result, a paper published in the British Medical Journal shows, is that abstinence programmes are “associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants.”15 You read that right: abstinence training increases the rate of teenage pregnancy.
“If all this were widely known, the conservatives and evangelicals would never dare to make the claims they do. So they must ensure that we don’t find out. In January the Sunday Telegraph claimed that Europeans “look on in envy” at the US record on teenage pregnancies.16 It supported this extraordinary statement by deliberately fudging the figures: running the teenage birth rate per 1000 in the US against the total teenage birthrate in the UK, so leaving its readers with no means of comparison.
“Breathtaking as this deception is, it’s not half as bad as what Bush has been up to. When his cherished abstinence programmes failed to reduce the teenage birthrate, he instructed the US Centers for Disease Control to stop gathering data.17 He also forced them to drop their project identifying the sex education programmes which work, after they found that none of the successful ones were “abstinence-only”.18 Bush should also hope that we don’t look too closely at his record as governor of Texas. He spent $10m on abstinence campaigns there, with the result that Texas has the 4th-highest rate of HIV infection in the Union, and the slowest decline of any state in the birthrate among 15-17 year-olds.19”
And http://www.monbiot.com/2008/02/26/pro-death/
“A paper published by the British Medical Journal assessed four programmes seeking to persuade teenagers in the UK to abstain from sex. It found that they “were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants”(15). This shouldn’t be surprising. Teenagers will have sex whatever the grown-ups say, and those who are the least familiar with contraceptives are the most likely to become pregnant. The more effectively religious leaders and conservative newspapers anathemise contraception, sex education and pre-marital sex, the higher the abortion rate will go. The cardinal helps to sustain our appalling level of unwanted pregnancies.
“But while his church causes plenty of suffering in the rich nations, this doesn’t compare to the misery inflicted on the poor. Chillingly, as the Lancet paper shows, there is no relationship between the legality and the incidence of abortion. Women who have no access to contraceptives will try to terminate unwanted pregnancies whatever the consequences might be. A report by the World Health Organisation shows that almost half the world’s abortions are unauthorised and unsafe(16). In eastern Africa and Latin America, where religious conservatives ensure that terminations remain illegal, they account for almost all abortions. Methods include drinking turpentine or bleach, shoving sticks or coat hangers into the uterus(17) and pummelling the abdomen, which often causes the uterus to burst, killing the patient(18). The WHO estimates that between 65 000 and 70 000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while five million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, “are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes.”(19) I hope David Cameron, who has just announced that he wants to place restrictions on legal terminations in the UK(20), knows what the alternatives look like.
“When the Pope tells bishops in Kenya, the global epicentre of this crisis, that they should defend traditional family values “at all costs” against agencies offering safe abortions(21), or when he travels to Brazil to denounce the government’s contraceptive programme(22), he condemns women to death. When George Bush blocks US aid for family planning charities that promote safe abortions, he ensures, paradoxically, that contraceptives are replaced with backstreet foeticide(23). These people spread misery, disease and death. And they call themselves pro-life.”
Could you please, in future, try to refrain from writing such long comments. This is an essay rather than a comment. Thanks.
Sorry about that. Got carried away. I won’t quote so egregiously in the future.
Evidence of this sort has been available for decades. We had the same debate about abstinence-only sex education under the Reagan administration.
The fact that nothing has changed as result suggests that the continuing push for abstinence-only has nothing to do with preventing unwanted pregnancies and abortions, since it’s manifestly ineffective at that. Its real purpose (as I said at comment #2) is about exposing and shaming girls who do not abstain from sex — and from that point of view, it’s a resounding success.
You mean they were pushing a moral ideology about the vices of certain kinds of sex, huh? Figures. I should have guessed as much. That’s practically one of religion’s main functions.
Didn’t Ronnie say something like stick the pill between your knees and keep them together?? Something really useful, in any case. Around the time of If you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all…