Don't Entrust Your Kids' Sexual Health to Bureaucrats

Kids grow up so fast these days. I remember when I was a wee one, terrorizing the hallowed halls of my middle school, days were consumed with how to sell more Blow-Pops and Airheads for buying movies, avoiding those freakish 7th-graders who were about five and a half feet tall towering over us dwarfins and then didn't grow for the rest of there lives, and skimming through books and magazines at 11 o'clock for a book report the following day. Now, I guess middle schoolers have to worry about "family planning."

The New York Times reports a school in Portland, Maine has approved to start offering a variety of wellness services such as physicals and immunizations ... oh, and dispensing birth control. The proposal was approved by 10 of the 12 member school board and was backed by the Portland Division of Public Health.

I suppose if one had to choose, it would be better for a 13-year-old to engage in safer intimate activity to prevent "fluid-sharing" and procreation than a less safe interaction. Of course, wouldn't it be better if barely teenagers were actually being directed in positive activities like their studies, after-school activities, or recreational drug use?

The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.

The argument for this is not to encourage sexual activity but to ensure those who are active are doing so safely. By this reasoning, we should expect to see in Portland the distribution of clean needles for heroin because it is safer?

Regardless, all this hubbub is being caused by 25 kids, probably living on the wrong side of the tracks (if such a place exists in Maine) who need nothing more than a stable and influential guiding figure in their life. Perhaps with all his free time Michael Vick could lend a hand to Big Brother, Big Sister.