Roundup: FL School District to Review Ab-Only, Sorting Real Feminism from Fake

Florida school district suspends ab-only program, US teen pregnancy rate much higher than other developed nations.

CORRECTION: On Palin and Special Needs Funding

Editor’s Note: As you will see in comments below, when this piece first published it quoted from this post asserting that Palin cut funding for special needs kids. That is not accurate, as explained here on Daily Kos. We have edited this headline and replaced the original quote from the post with this correction. It should be noted the original error was due to a misreading of state budgets because programs had been shifted into different agencies — not a malicious attempt to mislead, simply a mistake.

We regret quoting the mistake and urge all anti-choice sites to similarly correct posts that have been clearly determined to be inaccurate by independent fact checking organizations, where the attempt seems to be more an effort to mislead than a mistaken read of the Alaska State Budget.

Florida School District to Suspend Ab-Only Program

Florida law requires that school districts "teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage," but at least one school district is suspending the teaching of the abstinence-only program until it can evaluate the program’s effectiveness. A Volusia County mother complained that "fails to provide information about birth-control methods other than abstinence, discriminates against gay and lesbian student sand hasn’t been evaluated for its effectiveness," triggering a review. The School Health Advisory Committee plans to make recommendation to the School Superintendent by January.

US Teen Pregnancy Rate Far Higher than Other Developed Nations

The Forward compares US teen pregnancy statistics with those of other nations, finding that "the United States isn’t sitting respectably at the high end of a continuous scale." Rather,

America stands nearly alone, amid a handful of poor ex-communist states in Eastern Europe, including Armenia, Moldova, Bulgaria and Ukraine. Even in that group, we’re at the high end with a rate of 83.6 teen pregnancies per 1,000, topped only by Russia at 102 per 1,000. Behind us is a cluster of mostly English-speaking countries, including England, Canada and Australia, where teen pregnancy runs at about 44per 1,000, or about half the American rate. Finally, most of Western Europe runs along a spectrum ranging from 27 per 1,000 (Israel, Sweden) to a low of 12 (Spain, Italy, the Netherlands).

Palin, No Feminist; Questioning Her Record, Not Sexist

Not yet quite convinced that a vote for Palin wouldn’t be a vote for feminism? EJ Graff makes it plain. She explains:

 

Palin wouldn’t have been nominated without feminism; there just wasn’t a market for a female veep candidate until Hillary and the White House Project and all those tiresome discussions of unequal pay created that market. Now that she’s nominated, though, Palin appears happy to reap that advance without expanding on it.

 

Need some help sorting real sexism from the supposed sexist treatment of Sarah Palin? On Current TV, Rebecca Traister has a primer for you.