Letter to the Editor Re: Family Planning Waiver

Re: Crossroads Editorial on Family Planning Waiver

All research states parents have the greatest influence on children to avoid sexual risk behaviors. Teens know it and prove it by going to doctors and clinics that let them avoid their parents’ disapproval or disappointment. Through the Family Planning Waiver, adults give teens birth control and adult taxpayers pay for it. This version of adult responsibility insures that teens will be sexually active before they are planning families. Clinic adults have eliminated parents from the best shot a child has to avoid or stop sexual behavior. The Planned Parenthood coalition has created the perfect business model--create, expand, serve and profit from your client base—and neutralized their opposition. In the process, children get the diseases, babies and heartbreak.

If children have sex once, without any aggressive adult intervention and guidance, they will continue to have sex. The younger they start, the more sex partners they have, and the greater their exposure to pregnancy, STDs and AIDS. Sex, not lack of access to contraception or condoms, causes all three. “Dual protection” is the newest promotion and, as with all the others, is a theory without proof in reality. Adults offer damage control. Teens deserve better. Parents deserve better.

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It is not the dispensing doctor and nurse who are at the girl’s bedside when she is dying of HPV-induced cervical cancer, or comforting her when diagnosed with sterility, or helping to manage her HIV meds, or losing their golden years raising her children. The parents will be there to pick up the pieces of what other adults denied them the opportunity to prevent or even monitor. Parents deserve better.