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Preventing the unwanted

Abortion is a hot topic.

Nobody likes abortion, not even its defenders. They call themselves “pro choice,” not “pro abortion.”

But the passions that form around this topic have led to an impasse. Arguments seem to go nowhere practical but to signal to your own side how virtuous you are.

We call this “virtual signaling.”

A more productive conversation would include the condition requiring abortion: The unwanted pregnancy.

Very few wanted pregnancies are aborted. To attack abortion, and keep in mind that nobody likes abortion, we should attack the reasons why women who don’t want to be pregnant are pregnant.

The easy answers are first in mind. Violence or being dumb and horny could explain unwanted pregnancy.

But in this opinion piece, I would like to make a coherent contrast between ourselves and a land with a very low rate of abortion, the Netherlands. It will help shed light on a much deeper issue about youthful sexuality that we Americans have.

I will also apply the very old and fine sociological concept of anomie.

In our highly sexualized culture, there are two ways of preventing unwanted pregnancy. Abstinence works 100%.

But it requires a powerful and cohesive social structure such as a strong church group.

When applied without that powerful social structure, it fails.

This is why abstinence works, but abstinence programs willy nilly in schools tended to not work. Years ago the abstinence director at our local high school asked my opinion. Motherjones magazine requested an interview with her. The liberal magazine was no doubt looking for a poor Appalachian community to mock over its evangelical culture and teen pregnancies. I flatly advised her to accept the interview. I thought transparency was best. I think she declined the request.

The other way, however, is to develop a normative structure around young people’s sexuality.

Sociologist Amy Schalet compares the United States and the Netherlands.

The Dutch see young people’s sexuality as healthy and normal. Parents seek control of children through connection with them and discuss sex openly. Sex education includes discussions of passion, pleasure and prevention. There are even sleepovers between teens. As a result, young people develop the ability to manage sexual feelings and navigate sexualized cultures.

For many in America, there is little sense of what is normal.

In our society, where sex sells and the media drives it up our noses, parents have a fighting posture against youthful sexuality. Sociologists call this type of condition “anomie.”

It is a powerful engine of tension, depression and anxiety for the individual. Parents here speak of “not ever going to be ready” and “raging hormones.”

T shirts read “DADD; dads against daughters dating.”

American parents seek connection through control.

As a result, there are abrupt forces between which young Americans slide. Obsessions about sex and fear of sex coexist in the same person and they develop little sense of mastery or control over sexuality.

Sex is a force outside of them and it just sort of happens. It is a mistake to assume sex among the young is planned or pleasurable. I hate to say it because we need a bad guy, but this anomie helps explain the gray areas surrounding consent and coercion.

At this point we almost expect our youth to stumble into a mess of parenthood. It seems the stumble is how most American babies are made.

Getting pregnant and having children should be an enormous decision and for the sake of the future, we need to take the process very seriously. But many young American parents did not really choose their partners.

Pregnancy comes first and then something like commitment.

Parents raising children they were not prepared for or did not want has already articulated into schools, workplaces and criminal justice systems in disastrous ways.

The conservative approach of abstinence works for devotees.

Cohesive churches can counsel couples together in the face of a sexualized culture. The Dutch approach works too.

The society can own sex and train its youth effectively.

What most of us have here and now, as much as we would like to think differently, is neither one.

One abortion is too many.

Yet one unwanted child is too many too. The conversation needs to change.

Amy Schalet’s Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Cultures of Sex is available at Stevenson Library at Lock Haven University.

(Greg Walker is a sociologist who lives in Lock Haven. You can reach him at gwalker@lockhaven.edu.)

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