Trust the New York Times-owned Boston Globe to champion the wife of Maine's Attorney General for her support of Portland's proposed policy to supply birth control and abortions to 11-year-olds.
Oct 28, 2007 - Even while district attorney Stephanie Anderson is warning the school health clinics that that they were illegally failing to report underage sex, the Boston Globe profiled Amanda Rowe and her outspoken support for the program. Their source was a glowing article in the Portland Press Herald.
TT - In an age where readers were allowed input into newspapers, when facts were eagerly explored, topics debated, and ethics and morality were guidelines and active quests for most people, the school attorney, not the flamboyant activist, would have been profiled as a champion of decency.
Rowe and her husband have four children.
These are the middle schools in Portland, Maine. Not one is academically decent. They can provide sex education, condoms, abortions and birth control to every student if they want, but it isn't going to help students learn to read or find joy in education. It won't help students achieve self-sufficiency in this world, for themselves or their future families.
King Middle School ** the school for which the policy is proposed
66% white 19% black 11% Asian
Rates a 6
473 students
Lincoln Middle School
75% white 12% Asian 9% black 3% Hispanic
Rates a 5
513 students
Lyman Moore Middle School
88% white 5% black 5% Asian 1% Hispanic
Rates a 5
591 students
West School
83% white 8% black 4% Hispanic 4% Amer Indian
Unrated
49 students
Some 41% of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch program in the entire school district. In King Middle School, the figure is 61%.
What is becoming abundantly clear about such policies is that they are, at heart, eugenics disguised as a caring social policy. It's all right for Rowe and her husband to have four children, but clearly other people should limit their reproduction. That is the point of birth control for children. Teach them NOT to have children. Teach them early how to terminate children as casually as you take out the garbage.
And then count on those same children to drop out before high school because, academically, they haven't been prepared for anything else. Look at the graduation rates for this district (from Standard & Poor's Schoolmatters.com)
In a state where the general population is 95% white, it is very, very hard not to conclude that those in power would like to keep it that way.
Background
See the following for background on the school policy. Link Link
In the 1890s when public schools were formed, the overriding goal was to take uneducated immigrant populations, assimilate them, teach them values that would make them middle class, give them academic skills that would be a ladder for social mobility, and teach them respect for others and themselves.
Schools taught students how to think for themselves, how to speak in public, formulate ideas of their own. Schools equipped students for a future of their own choosing that didn't include overpriced, mediocre colleges hyped by supermarket magazines, a non-education that burdens them with a school loan debt for years and the only skill they learn is how to pass mediocrity onto others via the classroom.
Teaching an 11-year-old how to take birth control pills, seek an abortion at school without parents being any the wiser, encouraging adult males to prey on young girls without the inconvenience of that nasty pregnancy, all with government approval, is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
