Nell, my daughter, is in high school. Today she was given the opportunity to sign an Abstinence Freedom Pledge, which does not, as it sounds, grant her freedom from abstinence. What it seems to want to free her from is becoming a fully functioning adult.
She was savvy enough to send me a quick cellphone image of part of the page (because I vaguely remember something about an AP Human Geography test, but am now completely distracted by this).
The school system has generously promised that by committing herself to “self, my family, my friends (?), and my future spouse (?!?!?) to be sexually abstinent until I enter into a marriage relationship,” that she will be free from “pregnancy, STDs, possible negative emotions (worry, guilt, etc), and the responsibility and worry of contraceptives.”
Where to start? It’s like seeing the doors of Notre Dame for the first time- your eyes don’t know where to land because there’s something astounding on every stone inch.
First, she’s supposed to make a serious personal commitment to someone she’s never met? What if FS made a different commitment, maybe to spend the time to get to know and understand the person they’re going to marry so they can make her happy in all aspects of their relationship? Which is what I hope the person who marries my daughter will be committed to doing.
And what do her friends have to do with it at all? It’s one thing to commit to go home with the group you went out with- that’s just smart. But to commit to your friends that you won’t have sex with someone they’ve never met, don't care about, and may not like? The range of results from that part of the pledge stretch from No Result to Backfire Dramatically, with nothing on the plus side of the line.
Putting aside the bald-faced lie of no STDs or negative emotions (a promise so fantastic the nuns wouldn’t have made it, so where the curriculum committee is mining this omniscience is a metaphysical mystery); I am stunned and reeling from the freedom from responsibility for contraception. Freedom from family planning! This is an organization that wants 8th graders to choose a career path and follow it through high school, so they will emerge prepared to take their place in the economy. So 45 years of passion, time, and income is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask 14 year-olds to be responsible for; but how a condom works is just too much for their little brains?
Nell is smart, and understands the gravity of pledging her word. I have far more confidence in her than I do in her Health workbook.
About the names: many years ago my father offered my siblings and me ‘big money’ to name our children Sparky and Nell. The fact that none of us took him up on it speaks as much to our doubts about the sum in question as it does about the greatness of those names. Knowing Dad, it was in or scrip or uncashed dog race tickets.
But that’s what they’ll be in this space. Miss you, Dad.