<p>Aren’t pills available only by prescription? Aren’t they a medication that’s not OTC? I don’t quite get how the school can take it upon themselves to dispense a medication.</p>
<p>Like I said before, schools will not even give Tylenol, which is OTC, so how on earth do they get around distributing medicines that interfere with hormonal balances?</p>
<p>What about severe headaches, depression, weight gain, cardiac problems etc. associated with pills. Who will be monitoring that?</p>
<p>And as far as HIPPA goes, parents would have to be the ones to call the school on a regular basis to find out if their child is on the pill?</p>
<p>I don’t know the details of how this “program” is set up. Someone else posted that the school has contracted with an outside medical provider to prescribe and supply the pills. I would think that there is a tremendous medical liability issue that the school would not want to assume by dealing directly with the student plus who on the school staff would have the necessary state license to prescribe and deliver prescriptive medication.</p>
<p>As to HIPPA, the statute addresses access to and privacy of medical records. Parents of minor children have the right to access their kids’ medical records. In practical terms, a parent would have to ask the school or the outside provider to provide access to the records or could simply ask if the kid is accessing any services and if so, the details.</p>
<p>This is a separate issue of whether the school or outside provider has an affirmative obligation to notify the parents.</p>
<p>edvest: I’ll say this one more time. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’m a libertarian, not a liberal.</p>
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<p>Yes it is. The rationale for statutory rape laws is generally that a power imbalance in a relationship creates implicit coercion in the consent to sex. Thus “statutory rape”, because the victim may have consented, but it is assumed due to the age asymmetry that coercion is implicit in that consent.</p>
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<p>Which invalidates my 13 year-old example how?</p>
<p>MichaelNKat said it well, but I’ll say it again. There are different degrees of “badness”. Two 13 year olds having sex is a bad idea - they’re not mature enough for it, don’t know the consequences well, etc. etc. etc. But since the two are both equally stupid, since one is (I assume) not taking advantage of the other (if one is, obviously it’s a different story), then it’s just a bad idea.</p>
<p>There’s lots of bad ideas that aren’t immoral - riding a motorcycle iwthout a helmet, driving a car without a seatbelt, eating crappy, fatty food, smoking cigarettes, and so on. Just because they’re bad ideas doesn’t make them immoral. And even if they were immoral, doesn’t necessarily make them candidates to be legislated against.</p>
<p>So that’s the thing with this issue. It’s a bad idea for preteens to be having sex - a very, very bad idea. But that doesn’t make it immoral. It also doesn’t make it something we should be legislating against. It needs to be dealt with through parental involvement, increased education (in school and out), and yes, birth control and protection must be made available if kids are having sex regardless of this education.</p>
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<p>Decided to save this for last.</p>
<p>How can you write this stuff seriously? Are you seriously positing that “liberals” go through life just being contrarian? Contrarian to whom? What if I said that you were being contrarian to me? It’s just as valid as you saying the same, and equally as useless.</p>
<p>My version of morality includes protecting people from infringements on their rights, and educating them so that they don’t do stupid things. My morality does not include legislating to force them to conform to what I think they should do. My personal morals (which don’t include having sex at 12 years old) do not and should not apply to everyone. I may not at all approve of a behavior, but that does not mean I have the right to make the people behaving that way stop.</p>
<p>Do you disagree with that? Are you of the belief that you have the right to make others follow your moral code?</p>
And then the consideration has to be made that the patch has (IIRC) a higher rate of cardiovascular side effects than the pill – how much risk is the school district willing to take on to give out hormonal birth control?</p>
<p>I think condoms and sex ed are a great idea for these kids. Hormonal birth control, not so much.</p>
<p>1of42, you have repeatedly stated, “The rationale for statutory rape laws is generally that a power imbalance in a relationship creates implicit coercion in the consent to sex.” It’s important to remember that the imbalance exists because a minor cannot legally consent. If both parties are minors they still cannot legally consent.</p>
<p>I disagree. I think there is a lot more to statutory rape law than “minors cannot consent, adults can”. It’s all about the imbalance of power - economic power, social power, and so forth. If you are proposing otherwise, then you are saying that every minor (including 16- and 17-year olds) who’s ever had sex was unable to give consent, and thus were raping each other.</p>
<p>In this concrete example, if we say that the kids are unable to give consent, what does that mean and what do we do? Accuse them of raping each other? Clearly absurd outcomes arise if we consider it that way. So the best way to deal with the issue is to make sure imbalances and implicit coercion do not occur. If the kids are having sex at that point, educate them, and if they are still doing it, make it safe.</p>
<p>All statutory rape laws of which I am aware involve a codification of “inherent coercion” and “lack of consent” based on a disparity of age between the parties. There is an irrebuttable legal presumption that one party, due to defined “tender years”, is not capable of giving consent and the other party, due to the defined age disparity, exercises inherent coercive power. Statutory rape laws are different than laws such as “Corruption of the Morals of a Minor” which can involve age disparities that don’t qualify for statutory rape. The latter are an attempt to codify concepts of cultural norms and morality and application is driven by the particular facts and circumstances, not “per se” irrebuttable definitions of criminal conduct.</p>
<p>In an attempt to bring this discussion back to the Portland Maine reality it is, I am including a link to a story from today’s paper featuring several kids from this middle school. Their perspective is a very important, imperative one. Specifically, they say, STOP thinking this is about 11 yr olds, the end of the article had the most poignant part of the story, which I am pasting here. To me, this shows incredible compassion, what wonderful examples these kids are setting in the glare of everyone’s judgements:</p>
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<p>So what’s the best way to dissuade a middle-schooler from having sex? </p>
<p>“Your parents,” Hugh replied. Four other heads nodded in unison. </p>
<p>That said, Devon noted tactfully that some kids “don’t have a good home situation and they don’t have good friends. That’s when school is good because they can go – very awkward, I know – but they can go to a teacher or someone like that. Every kid needs someone to talk to, no matter who it is.” </p>
<p>A young teenager with no one to talk to lives in what Grania called a “dark world.” </p>
<p>“I don’t want to go into that dark world,” she said. "Because we know some people in our school who are in that world – and they seem so miserable. I look at them and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I don’t want to be like that.’ … " </p>
<p>Nor, on the other hand, do these kids want to turn their backs on peers who have crossed prematurely into the fast lane. According to school health officials, five current students at King (all ages 14 or 15) have divulged to the health center staff that they are sexually active. That’s 1 percent of the school’s 510- student population. </p>
<p>As far as Devon is concerned, if birth control pills or other forms of contraception can serve as a last line of defense between those kids and pregnancy, then so be it. </p>
<p>“Don’t leave behind that 1 percent of kids,” she said. “It’s 1 percent, but it still matters.” </p>
<p>“Yeah,” Madeleine agreed. “They still matter.” </p>
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<p>Here is the entire article…read it if you really care:</p>
<p>For what its worth, the Maine statute that makes sex with a person under 14 a felony, does not call such behavior “rape,” rather it is called “gross sexual assault.” And yes, two people can assault each other simultaneously, and I’m pretty confident cases involving both parties assaulting each other are prosecuted frequently (think domestic violence cases and bar fights, for example).</p>
<p>One of major difference between conservative and liberal is liberals think there is no right or wrong. My bad = your good, and your good = my bad. There is no principles, while a conservative thinks there is a set of innate moral codes that members of civilized society live by. Only in extreme cases does a conservative consider degrees of badnes. A wrong is usually never good. Nowhere is this deviance more evident in 1of42’s post#82 where he equates pre-teens having sex with eating fatty foods. 1of42, by the way, still has not answer my question to him: will you let your children read what you wrote ?</p>
<p>About the kids’ replies - passionately written yes, but still wrong. I do not think it is the role of schools to replace parental responsibility. Parents should be parents. Nowhere within a public school’s charter does it say it should replace bad parenting. If a councilor come to know a kid is in that “dark world”, he/she can refer to the Department of Social Services. That is the proper way to help.</p>
<p>With Birth Control pills freely available through the school, would it not encourage those kids who abstain from sex because of their worry of becoming pregnant, to avail of the pills now? </p>
<p>This may sound like the needle-exchange argument, where people said that there would be more drug use if free needles are provided, but adults are unlikely to decide to start using I.V. drugs just because needles are available. Kids are more likely to experiment with pills. Especially with the school intervention, it may seem like an endorsement.</p>
I don’t think young people, particularly middle school students, would abstain from sex because of worries over becoming pregnant. I have never heard a friend say that they weren’t having sex because they feared pregnancy, and I don’t think that this is a normal thought/decision making process by that age category. Would a middle schooler not ride a bike if s/he didn’t have a helmet? I doubt it.</p>
<p>Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird to be talking about middle schoolers taking birth control pills and wearing bike helmets in the same breath? I’m not trying to give you a hard time corranged – it just points out how preposterous it is to consider sex for junior high kids as a reasonable option.</p>
<p>That’s absolutely not true, edvest, and it aggravates me that you continue to so wholly misinterpret what I’ve been saying. In case you missed it, I think preteens having sex is wrong. But there are lots of things in this world that are wrong, and many of them are things you “conservatives” stridently argue against being legislated. In that same way, I argue against this one being legislated.</p>
<p>For the record, I do have a moral code. But one of the things I prize highly in that moral code is liberty, which means just because I think someone is doing something wrong, does not mean I go and make them stop doing it.</p>
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<p>Just because something is wrong, again, does not necessarily make it immoral, and even if it’s immoral, does not necessarily make it something that must be legislated against.</p>
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<p>…and your utter lack of ability to understand/correctly interpret what I say shows its head again. If you actually think I was equating the two, you’re incapable of reading. my point was that both preteens having sex, and people eating crappy food are wrong, both are not immoral (though both are bad ideas), and both should not be legislated against. Obviously I think preteens having sex is worse than eating crappy food, but that still doesn’t mean we should be legislating against it.</p>
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<p>Sure. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve said here. As a parent, of course I would let my kids know that I’m against the government legislating whether or not they could have sex. But again, as a parent, I would also educate them as to why having sex at that age is a terrible idea, and do my best to ensure that they wouldn’t. But then, if it came down to them having sex whether I wanted them to or not, I would make sure that it would be as safe as possible.</p>
<p>Which is exactly what I’ve been arguing here.</p>
<p>Bike Helmets? I don’t see the comparison. Kids would not think twice about getting on a bike without a helmet, if there wasn’t one around.</p>
<p>I can easily see kids not having sex because of the fear of getting pregnant. Especially those whose parents are actively involved in these kinds of conversations. This topic, together with STDs, is widely and constantly presented at our Middle Schools in seminars. If pills are available on a walk-in and confidential basis, through your own school, it’s an endorsement. It’s your School Principal saying it’s okay.</p>
<p>This is the part I don’t understand. (I want to preface this by acknowledging that there are a tremendous amount of “latch-key” kids who have no supervision for hours a day, and that is presumably how they end up being sexually active at ages 11-13.)</p>
<p>Looking at my 13-year-old’s life however, it would be virtually impossible for my son to have sex at his age if I didn’t want him to, let alone be engaged in a regular sexual relationship that required bc. He doesn’t go anywhere unless I drive him. He is never alone anywhere; there is always an adult I know and trust present. He is not allowed to be alone with girls in my house or in others’ homes (not that he would even want to be).</p>
<p>So 1of42, how would your 11-13 year old kids have sex if you didn’t want them to?</p>
I disagree. First of all, I doubt the 11 and 12 year olds having sex have parents who actively speak to them about sex and safer sex. Second, in my experience this just isn’t how middle schoolers think. When I was in middle and early high school, the people who had sex were going to have sex no matter what, to feel loved or grown up or cool or valued or whatever, and the people who weren’t wouldn’t, normally because they didn’t feel ready or didn’t feel the need to have sex. I know people who had sex while quite young, and I know a lot of people who didn’t, but I never heard any friends say they weren’t having sex because they feared pregnancy. Your experience in a different part of the country may differ, but in my experience the “I don’t want to get pregnant!” line is used to mask the more important underlying objections to having sex at that time, such as just not feeling ready.</p>
<p>That statement, Bay, was of course hypothetical. As is the entire discussion, clearly, since I don’t have kids.</p>
<p>My point was this. I would do my very best to make sure my kids wouldn’t have sex at that age. I think I would succeed, for the reasons you outlined - I don’t think I intend to have “latch-key” kids. But my point is, if a kid is going to have sex regardless of what parents think, better to make it as safe as possible than to just keep telling the kid not to do it, while they continue doing it unsafely, and thus open them up to a number of dangers.</p>
<p>Sounds like you are splitting hair, 1of42. Pre-teen sex is bad idea but is not immoral. As as parent you are against it, but if your 12 year old kid must have sex, then have it as safe as possibly. Pretty thin line you draw here. Maybe your lawyer’s training affected how you look at everything thing. I am not a lawyer, but reading your line I take it immorality is against the law, such as incest, while preteen sex ( if you are over 12 in Maine ) is not ( that is if you are over 12 year old in Main ); the kids are just exercising their liberty. That pretty much sums up your argument.</p>