Since all the cool bloggers cuss, I’m going to try to ramp it up a little bit myself…

Yesterday, Supreme Overlord and Excessive Provider of Dog Snacks posted a rather interesting entry on the nature of reality, teenagers, and sex education:

I have a whole post drafted up about abortion, but it’s mostly about adults, so I’ll post it later. Plus, it seems to me that all the things I have to say in that post can only follow what I have to say in this post; otherwise, the subject of this post would be a big empty question mark in the other one.

Okay. Let’s do this. The catalyst for this discussion is something Barack Obama has said:

“This is an example where good people can disagree,” the Illinois senator said. “The question then is, are there areas that we can agree to that everybody can get behind? We can all agree that we want to reduce teen pregnancies. We can all agree that we want to make sure that adoption is a viable option.”

The exchange appeared to be prompted by Obama’s earlier comments that he does not favor abstinence-only education, but rather comprehensive sexual education that includes information on abstinence and birth control.

“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

A lot of conservatives are going to hate him really hard for that statement. They’re going to say he’s an asshole for equating a baby with “punishment”, and so on. I understand this reaction, but I also think that his overarching point is exactly right. Stick with me here.

She then provides a rather lengthy explanation of why she agrees with this stance - teenagers have hormones, they don’t have perfect self-control, they tend to ignore authority figures after a while, etc. Read the whole thing. I wouldn’t do justice to it if I tried to give little snippets of it.

I’m going to say right here and now that I agree with her overall point. That’s not what I’m going to write about today. Instead, I’m going to discuss the comments provided by her readers. She’s already done that, too, but I’m going in a slightly different direction.

The debate in her comments section, and, in fact, the general cultural debate on this falls under two categories:

- Children have a pre-natal right to exist, but, until they turn 18, they have no rights; they should only have a series of privileges provided and vetted by their parent or guardian.
- Children do not have an intrinsic pre-natal right to existence, but, upon birth, they have certain inalienable rights that are independent of their parents’ wishes or desires and are supported by the society at large.

The first position is traditionally the “conservative” view. The second position is traditionally the “liberal” view. What’s interesting about them is that both positions are compromises between maximizing the freedom of the parent and maximizing the freedom of the child. On the conservative side, after conception, the parent does not get to choose whether to be a parent - it’s assumed that, by engaging in acts that could potentially lead to conception, the parents have already made that choice. However, upon conception, that child is yours to do with basically as you please, upon the sole conditions that you don’t kill or physically abuse your child. On the liberal side, the parent has the right to decide, even after conception, whether or not they truly wish to be a parent, but, upon making that choice, the parent must abide by the rights and values that society enforces upon them regarding the upbringing of their child.

I’m somewhat conflicted on this, as I’m sure quite a few people are. On the one hand, a parent should have the right to raise their child as they see fit. On the other hand, should the child be punished because he or she happens to have parents that decide to teach the child that, say, Jews are evil, or willfully lead them to ignorance about the world? This is an issue that they’re facing in Europe right now - there are tons of parents from Middle Eastern countries that are raising their children to believe that Western values are inherently evil and against Allah’s way. Amusingly, many of the conservatives that would normally preach about “parents’ rights” would be the first to say that the state should intervene. Even more comical is that many liberals are the first to preach “parents’ rights” when dealing with Muslim fundamentalists but are also the first to subvert the rights of fundamentalist Christian parents. The hypocrisy is blinding.

I believe in consistency - what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Either we declare that parents have complete, total, and absolute control over what information and values their children are instilled with, or we declare that society needs some say on what information and values are passed on to children. Unfortunately, there are no good “libertarian” solutions to this problem - we’re either going to screw the child or the parents. There is no way we can provide both groups with complete freedom on this. We need to decide where the line should be drawn.

One big issue that I have with the conservative stance relates to personal responsibility. In order to have responsibility, you have to have free will - you can’t take responsibility for a choice if you’re never given choices to freely make. To illustrate this, consider the following scenario:

A man, wife, and child are taken hostage by a terrorist. The terrorist approaches the man and tells him to pick who dies - the wife, or the child. If the man does not pick either of them, the terrorist will kill both the wife and the child.

No matter who the man picks, is the man required to take responsibility for the death of either the wife or the child? Of course not - the man does not have free will. The terrorist is the one who made the choice to kill at least one of those people, and is also the one who made the choice to require the man to pick who should be killed. It is the terrorist that has genuine free will in this case, not the man.

This brings me to teenagers under the conservative system. Under the conservative system, teenagers, being children, do not have any rights - any “rights” that their parents may deign to give them may also be taken away at a moment’s notice. Consequently, they’re not really “rights” - rights are inalienable and cannot be removed by anybody. This is why I stated earlier that children only have a series of privileges. Consequently, these children do not have free will - they are not allowed to freely make choices regarding their life. Their parents make those choices for them. This becomes a bit sticky, however, when you start talking about teenage pregnancy. According to the conservative viewpoint, it is the teenager’s parents that ultimately get to choose whether that teenager is going to become a parent or not. It is true that the teenager gets to decide whether to have sex or not, but it’s a heavily restricted choice - unlike adults, who may choose to educate themselves about contraceptives and use them as they see fit, the teenager is at the mercy of the parent.

There are a couple of problems with this arrangement:

1. Can a teenager bestow privileges upon a child that the teenager itself does not have? Since the teenager has no rights, how can it confer any privileges upon its own child?

2. Who has responsibility for the new child - the teenager or the teenager’s parents? The teenager does have a choice whether to engage in sex or not, but it’s a false choice, with purposefully incomplete information and with most of the possible options intentionally disabled. This is functionally similar to “letting” a teenager drive a car, but teaching them that driving a car leads to car accidents and intentionally cutting their brake lines. The person responsible for the inevitable crash isn’t necessarily the teenager - it’s the person who decided the teenager shouldn’t be allowed to use the brakes.

In short, conservatively-minded parents try to teach their teenagers about personal responsibility by effectively denying them the ability to ever claim personal responsibility. You cannot be held responsible for something which you have no control over, and you certainly cannot be held responsible for something when you have absolutely zero control over the consequences or your available reactions to said consequences.

Consequently, I believe we either need to do one of two things:

1. If society decides that parents have complete and total control over their children and what information is provided to them, we must recognize that parents must have complete and total responsibility over the actions of their children. Consequently, all legal actions and punishments must be borne by the parents, not the child. In the case of teenage pregnancy, for example, it would be the parents of the father that would be responsible for providing child support, not the father himself.

OR…

2. Acknowledge that children have certain inalienable rights, including the right to do what they will with their body, and must therefore bear responsibility for their actions. However, all children must have equal opportunity to acquiring information that would help them make informed choices, and all children must have equal opportunity and access to the tools available and required to act on that choice. In the case of our topic today, that would mean that children must have access to acquire contraceptives (albeit not necessarily for free), information about contraceptives, and access and information about the current post-conception alternatives available to adults (keeping the child, adoption, and abortion).

So, which is it going to be?

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