For quite awhile now, I’ve been following The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood which is essentially a fundamentalist Christian organization opposed to “feminist egalitarianism” and a whole lot of other things.
CBMW’s views and ideology is essentially the inverse of mine, but I’ve been reading their stuff not to mock them but rather to better understand their point of view. Also, the essays that appear on CBMW’s website are very well written. I find the views they convey deplorable, but stylistically the writing is often superb.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, Jeremy Dys, the president and general counsel for The Family Policy Council of West Virginia published an essay at CBMW that outright lied about his topic.
Dys wrote (emphasis mine),
For the last few weeks, there has been a raging debate in the thriving metropolis that is Charleston, West Virginia, surrounding a speech given by a women at a local public high school in which she was promoting abstinence. In her own colorful way, she urged freshman through senior high school student toward abstinence by explaining the wide array of potential risks associated with serial, premarital non-monogamy. All of the risks, warts and all.
…
On the other side are parents who are apoplectic that students were given a message about abstinence. They haven’t really addressed the validity of the speaker’s facts; they simply rant about the fact that there was no “other side” represented in the discussion and, though the speech was purely secular, they lambaste the woman for being a person of faith in public. They slander the speaker and drag the principal’s good name through the mud evidently because they believe that boys and girls from 15 years old upward ought to have no restriction on their sexual appetite, be taught – by the state – methods of sex that the state (and abortion industry) deem are “safe,” and then be given unfettered (read = free, at taxpayer’s expense) access to every conceivable form of birth control or contraceptive – including abortion (which is not acontraceptive, but an anticonceptive, but I digress).
The first odd thing about this essay is that Dys mentions a controversy but gives no details or links that would allow someone to be certain of who the speaker is or fact-check his assertions about the controversy.
I assume, however, that he is referring to Pamela Stenzel, who ended up being part of national controversy when she spoke about abstinence at George Washington High School in Charleston, West Virginia, in April 2013. The case garnered national attention when student class vice-president Katelyn Campbell gave an interview to CNN about why she refused to attend the assembly at which Stenzel spoke. Campbell alleged that the school administration at George Washington High School threatened to retaliate against her for the CNN interview by attempting to sabotage her admittance to Wellesley College.
Dys writes that “they haven’t really addressed the validity of the speaker’s facts”, but this is a lie. In fact the entire controversy was centered largely on Stenzel’s absurd claims about sexuality.
As The Charleston Gazette reported,
Campbell said several students had recorded the presentation, where Stenzel allegedly made comments like, “If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.”
Someone recorded most of Stenzel’s presentation and uploaded it to Youtube. The recording starts after Stenzel allegedly made the comments above, but contains enough misinformation to make one wonder what Stenzel thinks her qualifications are.
She tells the students, for example,
Infertility–the inability to have children of your own biologically–has risen over 500 percent among women in 10 years. The girls that graduated from GW in 2003…many of them are just now today finding out they will never have children because of decisions they made sitting where you’re sitting.
Infertility is certainly a problem–in the United States, 10.9 percent of women 15-44 were considered to have impaired fecundity (impaired ability to get pregnant or carry a baby to term). And the rate of infertility does appear to be increasing, but the main driver of that appears to be women who are delaying having children until relatively late in their lives.
In 1970, the average age of first-time mothers in the United States was 21.4 years. By 2006, that had risen to 25.0 years. The rate at which women are waiting until significantly later in life to have children has risen even more dramatically–the number of women who became first-time mothers over the age of 35 increased 8-fold from 1970 to 2006. One in 12 women who gave birth for the first time in 2006 was over the age of 35.
Delaying pregnancy until the 30s or 40s can significantly increase the risk of fertility problems. As the CDC notes (emphasis added),
Many women are waiting until their 30s and 40s to have children. In fact, about 20% of women in the United States now have their first child after age 35. So age is a growing cause of fertility problems. About one-third of couples in which the woman is older than 35 years have fertility problems.
Aging decreases a woman’s chances of having a baby in the following ways—
- Her ovaries become less able to release eggs
- She has a smaller number of eggs left
- Her eggs are not as healthy
- She is more likely to have health conditions that can cause fertility problems
- She is more likely to have a miscarriage
Stenzel, on the other hand, seems to view infertility as something that a) is almost exclusively caused by sexually transmitted diseases, and b) is a frequent outcome of contracting an STD. For example, here’s what she has to say about one of the most common STDs, chlamydia,
[Girls, if] you contract chlaymida once in your lifetime, cured or not, and there is a 25 percent chance you will be sterile for the rest of your life.
Chlamydia is very serious, but Stenzel is off the mark with 25 percent claim.
Chlamydia is usually easily curable with a round of antibiotics, but since it often doesn’t result in any symptoms, it can go untreated for long periods of time. Because of this, in 10 to 40 percent of cases, chlamydia leads to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which can cause scarring in the fallopian tubes and the uterus. About 20 percent of women who contract PID will experience fertility problems (note that fertility problems do not necessarily equal Stenzel’s alarmist “sterile for the rest of your life”).
That means the risk of infertility is 8 percent, not 25 percent. (In fact, a recent epidemiological study found infertility rates from chlamydia to be much lower, and highly sensitive to how infertility was defined.)
Regardless, I suspect Stenzel is making the mistake of thinking that the commonly cited statistic that chlamydia is responsible for 25 percent of cases of infertility means that any woman who contracts chlamydia has a 25 percent chance of being rendered infertile. The latter does not, however, follow from the former.
Finally, if you listen to Stenzel’s presentation it quickly becomes clear she is opposed to abortion, and at the heart of her opposition to abortion is a very moving personal story. Unfortunately, since there is a lie at the heart of that moving personal story, it is difficult to gauge just how much of it is true and how much of it is for dramatic flair.
Stenzel goes on at length about her own birth to a teenage mom who was the victim of rape in the mid-1960s. Stenzel then explains that since Michigan allowed abortion in the case of rape in the 1960s, that her mother could have aborted her–given her the “death penalty”, as Stenzel put it.
Instead, her mother chose to give her up for adoption, and Stenzel dramatically describes in heartwarming terms the love she feels toward a woman she has never met for making this choice.
There’s just one (at least) problem with this story. Michigan’s ban on abortion, enacted in the 1930s, didn’t allow an exceptions for cases of rape. Michigan was, in fact, one of 30 states before Roe v. Wade that outlawed abortion without exception.
It is odd that someone who travels to high schools lecturing about sexual health–and has written a number of books on the topic–is so utterly ignorant of such basic facts and seems decidedly uninterested in educating herself.
It is also perplexing that someone like Dys expects to be taken seriously while counting such an ignoramus in his ranks, and, in fact, falsely claiming that no one attempted to address Stenzel’s “facts”.