“My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?” So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. “Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds.”
Unfortunately, the young women described in “Unprotected” have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their “sexual choices.” And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.
Written by
Domenico Bettinelli
Send a copy to Harvard – not that it would change their minds on co-ed dorm rooms….
There is some good coming out of Harvard. Has anyone heard the Harvard Pro-Life Students who work as volunteer speakers for the Archdiocese Respect Life Education Office? Their presentations to teens on Respect for Life and Chastity are fantastic!!
No one would let their teenager behind the wheel of a car without teaching them the rules of the road. But when it comes to sex education, it is like telling a teenager they can do whatever they want because they are wearing a seatbelt and back up protection with an air bag. What is really so hard about abstenince until commited monogamy that it can’t be taught?
We teach teenagers the rules of the road, even though we know some will be responsible for car accidents. We don’t say, “they are going to get not car accidents anyways so why bother teaching them the rules, instead let them be reckless and when enough teens get hurt or die they will eventually can figure it on their own that they can’t engage in reckless behavior.
Renee – I know that’s a rhetorical question you posed in the penultimate paragraph of the above post, but allow me to answer it anyway:
“Why don’t parents/teachers/adults/society teach teens abstinence? Because it would then require the parents/teachers/adults/society to reexamine their own behavior.”
Just like a drunk prefers the company of other drunks, avoiding teetotallers and AA members and rather encouraging others to drink with and like him, so too do the children of the 60’s who have embraced sexual libertinism avoid folks who preach abstinence, and rather encourage the newly pubescent to join THEIR ranks rather than ours.
But like most drunks, these sexual libertines don’t see themselves as having a problem.
Father,
Dysfunction does breed dysfunction. I guess today the term breeding would be inaccurate, since (as a generalization) adults with children tend to be more conservative then their liberal peers. People rather changing themselves lower the denominator through the educational system and other social programs.