Planned Parenthood Sued for Ignoring Statutory Rape

Dear Friend and Reader,

The term statutory rape offends me.

Rape is a violent, non-consensual sexual act committed upon an unwilling party. Statutory rape is de facto non-consensual sex because a person is under that state’s legal age of consent, and is therefore not of sound enough mind to make sexual choices.

When I was 16, I began my first year of college. Old enough for a philosophy class on contemporary ethics, but not old enough to have sex with Spyros, my 24 year old Greek friend who made me Turkish coffee one morning when I couldn’t get to sleep after the 6 am construction started outside my dorm room.

Now, one of my favorite organizations, Planned Parenthood, is being sued for failing to detect statutory rape when a 14 year old girl came in with a 21 year old guy (who said he was her step-brother) for an abortion. The girl is 18 now, and her parents are suing. Funny how the parents tend to be the ones complaining about underage sex, not the people who are having it. She could have had a four year old by now, if her parents were Sarah and Todd Palin, and the laws on underage abortions were tighter.

This lawsuit is mixing around while California is deciding on its parental consent rules. There will be a vote on California Proposition 4 on Nov. 4, deciding whether women under the age of 18 can have abortions without parental consent and a 48-hour stay.

As reproductive rights are predominately decided state-by-state, there are already states, some Arkansas and Colorado, that have limited access to lower income people by banning public funding of abortions.

And forget about taking the pill in four states, because pharmacists now have the right to refuse to fill prescriptions that they disagree with morally or because of their religious beliefs, leaving women in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Dakota driving from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to fill birth control pills and emergency contraceptive (EC) prescriptions. We’re talking about birth control here: EC can only prevent fertilization, it’s not an early-term abortion, as many anti-choicers inaccurately report.

There is, without a doubt, an age when we are too young to consent to sex. But the answer to the “when” question is muddled. What does “old enough” mean? When we’re old enough to understand all the possible ramifications of our actions, because I’m still not there, and I’ll be 24 next week. And no one said it was illegal to have highly intoxicated one night stands did they?

If we’re going in that direction, then I have a list of types of sex that should be illegal, in no particular order, because it probably means we don’t fully understand the implications:

1. Unprotected sex.

2. Sex with an ex who has already started dating someone new but hasn’t told you yet.

3. Sex with anyone for the first time, because you don’t know where it could go and it could potentially be damaging.

4. Sex with anyone who is more than 24 hours older than you: they may have learned something about life that you haven’t, and could manipulate you.

Please feel free to add to the list. And to support Planned Parenthood, click here. They’re getting a lot of flack for trying to educate people about safer sex (god help us if we avoid contracting sexually transmitted infections or learn how to plan pregnancies during an economic crisis).

Yours & truly,