I live here.

Nationally, this is all the news.

I live in the middle of this, the school is a few miles away from us (although it is not the one we are districted for were my children to go to middle school here).

And as you well know, the news pundits, talk show hosts, and bloggers are all over this issue.

There are far too many points to argue, but I'd just like to ask a few questions....
I realize the answers are complicated, but I think it is still important to probe beyond the surface.

• Why was there no uproar about the condoms they've been distributing since the inception of the clinic? Why is only now when we are talking about the pill (and injections and patches) are people wringing their hands and bemoaning the state of today's youth? One answer, I'm sure, is that the pill and other measures require a prescription. It seems to me, though, that we as a society are much less concerned about the emotional and physical sexuality issues for boys than we are for girls. Are our boys less important in the discussion?

• How can we expect children (because they are still children in my book until at least 14!) to be responsible enough to remember a pill every. single. day. I'm not even going to get into the morality of taking a birth control pill, but we are expecting an awful lot of young girls to expect them to remember this and to fully understand the implications of using this type of birth control.

• On top of that, any of these birth control options are not going to help prevent STD's. Which from a health and welfare standpoint should be one of the state's main concerns. This is giving a false sense of security for our girls---and boys as well-- since they may feel that now pregnancy isn't a concern, they can stop wearing condoms if they are having sex.
  

• Of course there is also the medical issue of having years and years of hormones wreaking havoc on a young girl's reproductive system. If a 12 year old goes on the pill, she is more than likely going to continue this behavior for years to come. How will her health be affected? What if she needs to be treated for a medical condition and no one in her family is aware of the prescriptions she is using? What does this say about our society that we continue to look for such an easy solution to a complicated problem? Here, take a pill and don't worry about a thing?

I can argue the church's point on birth control and sex before marriage and a litany of other points, but these won't hold weight with those who don't believe or won't believe in this. So instead I want to ask these questions. I want to ask why parents just roll over and accept that this is the only way we can prevent teen pregnancy? I want to know why only the poorest school in our district has this clinic and these options? The other two middle schools don't have a health clinic and are unable to seek treatment at King. So, are upper-middle class parents more likely to take their daughter to the ob/gyn for a prescription? Are we only worried about the poor reproducing? I don't know. All I know is that the teens I've talked to this week (my babysitter and her friends), think it's pretty ludicrous that their younger sisters and brothers can access birth control freely. I think it's an awful position to allow the middle schoolers of our town to act as if they are mature adults. They're not. They're young souls that need instruction and love and parental guidance.

They need a parent to know what they're doing. Yes, that may be a difficult road to go down, but sometimes life requires that we take the difficult path. Sometimes we can't just take a pill to make it all go away.