I'm not sure what is worse about this most recent Sun-Times editorial: that it wastes space talking about a young celebrity who finds herself pregnant, or that it wastes the space by talking about it and including, not to mention a few choice others, these sentences:

"At 16 and knocked up, Jamie Lynn Spears won't be scandalized for her condition like teen moms of yesteryear. At least she is having her baby and not aborting it or denying responsibility."

My very good friend Margaret Lyons, editor of Chicagoist, summed up my feelings best in her post on the editorial, saying, "Hundreds of thousands of American women gets abortions every year. It is legal. Wasn't the Sun-Times supposed to be our progressive newspaper?

"Women can choose to terminate or not terminate their pregnancies, but it's hardly the Sun-Times's role to congratulate or demonize those choices."

I'm not writing any letters to the editor, or boycotting the Sun-Times, but instead I've decided that my silent protest to Cheryl Reed's moronic editorial is to start volunteering at the Chicago Women's Health Center, a feminist-run health clinic whose mission it is to provide affordable, respectful, and accessible gynecological and mental health care.

I encourage you in this coming new year - in this important election year - to become active in your communities, most importantly when it comes to women's health care. All women and girls, at every age, deserve the dignity that comes from having access to informative and safe medical care. When we deny women and girls this dignity, we reduce them and marginalize them into "good girls" and "bad girls," much in the same manner Cheryl Reed has done in her editorial.

Here's the thing: when it comes to sexuality, it doesn't matter how much money you do or do not have. The fact that Jamie Spears ended up pregnant at 16 is not a reflection of anything other than she's a human being and with that comes a whole bunch of hormones and sexual drive. And in our puritanical, hypocritical culture, we expect our girls to ignore these instincts by guilting them into virginity, which backfires tremendously. If we were a society that genuinely valued family, then we'd provide safe, smart and respectful sex education to our children at an early age, the kind that would help usher them into puberty armed with more than just some screwed up, fucked up notion of sex.

While I am adamantly, fiercely, passionately pro-choice, my feelings on this have nothing to do with abortion rights. I believe it is a procedure that should be available to women as a choice, but it is not one I wish to see any woman have to make. And I believe that places such as the Chicago Women's Health Center are a step in the right direction of helping to turn the tide of our culture, making education a priority so that no woman or girl is sent out in the world with simply the notion that sex is wrong or bad, and that they should save themselves for marriage or perish for all eternity.

As a way to wrap up that rant, I give you this amazing video, courtesy of Scott, featuring a song performed by a woman who portrayed a character symbolic of the women's rights movement so fantastically that without it, who knows if we'd ever have had Dorothy Zbornak.

And what a worse off world it would have been.

Posted by Erin at 05:10 PM | filed under: Blog move