Let’s get something straight right off the bat here. I am not a proponent of abstinence education though I respect my fellow parents’ choice to take that route. Nor am I saying that children shouldn’t get sex education at all. I’m saying that right now, and for the past several decades, our children have been getting the WRONG kind of sex education in the schools, and that’s exactly how we got to this point, where someone who took the Hippocratic Oath could sit there, munch on her greens and swirl her wine and talk callously about forceps and CRUSHING “below” and “above” in order to preserve the choicest parts of a human baby, whether for “humanitarian reasons” or for selling.
We are here today because we have commodified and objectified people. We have not only perverted the procreative aspect of the marital embrace, we have corrupted the unitive aspect as well. This determines whether we see human beings as integrated, WHOLE individuals — heart, soul, mind, and body — or whether we consider them simply a summation of organs, skin, nerves, bones and musculature.
The mentality that sees women as legs, butts, breasts and genitalia is exactly the same mentality that sees fetuses in the womb as hearts, lungs and livers: as objects that can be used, bought, or discarded.
How exactly does the kind of sex ed promoted in our schools lead to this?
Two nights ago my profile was blocked from the Planned Parenthood Facebook page, because of two little comments I made on their posting of this article. All I did was point out that fetal tissue could not have hearts, lungs, or livers, unless those organs came from the body of a human baby. On that same post, women were defending their “rights”, and Planned Parenthood for their “heroic role” in women’s health and saving women’s lives. The blindness was stupefying.
That same night the Women’s Rights Facebook page posted this video on Consent:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8[/youtube]
One comment in particular caught my eye: “I love this video. Something to show my boys when they’re old enough.”
?????
And I ask — in the 21st century, with decades of sex education behind us — how is it that we find a need for this kind of video, FOR ADULTS? Setting aside for now any moral arguments, including the argument that sex isn’t just about consent, what that video teaches is that a woman is more than just an orifice.
What is going on in sex ed? Young people are told that “they are going to have sex anyway”.
We teach our youth that they cannot help themselves, that sex is a need that MUST be satisfied. By doing that we disconnect their brains from their bodies, and tell them that the sexual urge is paramount over everything else. Focus is placed on “safety”, on prevention of disease and pregnancy, and not much else. Finding a partner who respects your emotional, mental and spiritual needs is to be set aside until you’re an adult (and if we are to be honest, many sex educators would scoff at “spiritual needs”).
We then expect our young men to magically transform into chivalrous beings, able to take women’s verbal and nonverbal cues and interpret them correctly, practice self-control and fight the rape culture, and recognize that women are more than bodies. Suddenly we want them to know that women also have brains and feelings and emotions and need more than just casual sex. In essence that’s when we say that relationship — the unitive aspect — is important. If it’s important in adulthood, shouldn’t that have been the lesson taught all along?
By the time the young woman reaches adulthood, chances are she has been used and discarded many times. Why should we expect her to turn around and give that baby in her womb more respect than men ever gave her, more respect than she ever gave herself?
When we Catholics talk about unitive and procreative, those aren’t simply words to us. Unitive to me as a Catholic means communion — of oneness in mind, body, soul and heart. It’s the kind of oneness that brings forth life, that respects life and doesn’t break it apart into pieces to be sold or donated at the whim of whoever is in control.
This is why contraception and abortion are ultimately not about empowering women. We rail about the rape culture and slut-shaming and consent. And yet that contempt for womanhood that we rail against is the same contempt we hold against the babies that come to inhabit our wombs.
Feminists can roar all they want about women’s rights; their roars are nothing but echoes of the same depravity that denies babies their humanity.
And which organization plays a large role in bringing about that depravity? The same organization that benefits from tax dollars and unsuspecting women, for whom the withholding of information means greater profits and continued support from blind followers who have lost their souls.
Related: Sex Education in the Homeschool
Theology of the Body
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