Why self-reflect when there’s some good moral panic to foster?
Three good posts on the Sunday Star-Times’ wankpiece on SECRET SCHOOLYARD ABORTION PERFORMED BY SATAN HIMSELF:
There’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while about fucking Nigel fucking Latta and his “teenagers are just mental” bullshit, but this brings up some of the same issues.
Teenagers aren’t fucking aliens. They’re not evil for no reason. And if your teenaged child gets pregnant and wants to have an abortion and doesn’t feel able to tell you, guess what? Not actually their fucking fault. They have their reasons.
Their reasons may not be “objectively” real – like, maybe you aren’t the kind of bastard who’s going to cuss them out and bar them from the house (in which case, small cookie to you for being a lot better than plenty of other fucking “parents”) – but frankly, if you haven’t done your job as a parent by being open and nonjudgemental about sex, or by spelling out clearly and sincerely that you will always support their reproductive choices, they have no fucking reason to assume the best from you in a society which treats teen pregnancy like it’s bubonic fucking plague.
And if in those circumstances your teenaged child tells their friends and seeks out an adult they do trust and gets helped through the shitty fucking hoops our legal system puts in the way of abortion? Try some fucking gratitude instead of making it All About Your Fucking Fee-Fees.
A-fucking-men. As I said elsewhere, what’s the problem if your child is behaving like an adult just like you want her to grow up to be?! Oh that’s right “*I* didn’t have control of the situation/her body/choices”.
Julie makes the point really well on THM – how was she “going through it on her own”? Because counsellors and friends don’t count the way your ~real mother~ does (oh gods there’s another rant to have).
Thanks so much for the link. So many people have made such good points in their criticism of this piece. I definitely think that the parents of girls who don’t feel able to tell them they are pregnant need to think about why that is (I say that as someone who was once a teenage girl who would not have told my mother).
In case you were wondering, it seems our friends at family first were behind this nonsense but I also hate that the SST swallowed this shit hook, line and sinker.
Well come on, Stef, I mean, they’re a weekly publication. They don’t have time to actually investigate the things they report.
Ditto. So much has been said on this, and so incredibly well, there is little I can do but show my support.
On the other hand, McCroskrie has a point – it really is unacceptable that a kid has to get parental permission to go to the zoo on a class trip. We really do need to do something about that.
For fucks sake – do these people have the faintest idea about how little young people tell their parents?
And still, there is so much vilification of the young woman for choosing abortion, and nothing about the young (or maybe not so young) man that got her pregnant in the first place. There seems to be so much blame on the young woman for “getting pregnant” as if there was nobody else involved.
Well you can’t blame a certain type of person for assuming that teenaged women magically wind up pregnant as a matter of course …
Just so, QoT. I read the article this morning, banged my head on the kitchen table, and thought, “Well, what the hell kind of parent are you if your child doesn’t feel she can turn to you in a crisis?”, and thought, must get around to writing on that but I hope some of the other strident feminists about the place do because I don’t actually have much time, and of course, you and some other people did. Thank you!
I’m so glad everyone else blogged about this. Because it made me so fucking angry. Well said.