The anti-abortion organisation SPUC has launched a campaign against the legal recognition of same-sex unions. This document comes as no surprise as we know that SPUC Director John Smeaton has written a number of blogs attacking same-sex unions, and calling homosexuality ‘disordered’. However, we are baffled by the argument that ‘allowing same sex marriage would damage society and would put the unborn child at a far higher risk of being aborted’.
SPUC’s position paper on same-sex marriage links to Government abortion statistics to back up its claim that ‘unborn children are much safer within marriage than outside marriage'. Abortion Statistics for England and Wales do show that overall, the majority of abortions are requested by unmarried women. But the partial use of these figures to argue that traditional, heterosexual marriage ‘protects children born and unborn’ is disingenuous. A closer look at the abortion statistics shows that age is the most significant factor. Only 1% of women under 20 having abortions are married. This is unsurprising considering the average age of marriage for women in the UK is 28. It should not lead us to the conclusion that being married in and of itself stops women requesting abortion. By the time they are 35 or over, married women make up a significantly larger proportion (40%) of women requesting abortion. The overall figures for the proportion of abortions carried out for married women are strongly skewed by the fact that 70% of abortions are provided for women under 30 many of whom aren’t married (yet).
Apart from age, there may be lots of reasons why women who are married may be under-represented in abortion statistics none of which points to a magical protective effect of marriage. What is certain is that nothing in the statistics demonstrates that allowing gay couples to marry will result in more abortions. The leap from ‘most women who have abortions are unmarried’ to ‘same-sex marriage causes abortion’ is bizarre. The attempt to dress up good old fashioned homophobia as social science is worse.
This blog from the brilliant Abortion Gang reminds us why the LGBT and pro-choice movements need to work together for reproductive justice. We have blogged before about our concern that organisations with a homophobic agenda are welcomed into our schools to talk to our children about abortion.We only have to look to the current situation in the States to see that if there is a connection between same sex marriage and abortion it is this: all too often those wishing to restrict women’s right to access safe, legal abortion are the very same people who are attempting to restrict the choices we make about who we can love and live with; how we define, create and care for our families; the way we live – in fact who we are.
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Teaching about marriage
Current Sex and Relationships Guidance asks schools to teach about the nature and importance of marriage and of stable relationships for family life and bringing up children. This wording recognises a range of different family structures and acknowledges that a child brought up in a variety of contexts can be fine if some basic pre-conditions are met.
It now transpires that conditions for funding for Free Schools and Academies obliges them to teach about the superiority of marriage and its importance in bringing up children, but apparently not other kinds of relationships or families. This new SRE formulation seems to have dropped the term ‘stable relationships’.
Why does that matter?
I think we can all think of examples of children being brought up by single or non-married parents who are happy and healthy and some who are damaged and vulnerable. We all know marriages that are destructive and that provide a bewildering and distressing context for family life as well as those that are safe and lovely. However, I will leave it for others to discuss the pros and cons of marriage itself and whether it is the societal panacea it is believed to be by some.
As an educator I am most concerned about classroom practice
When you work in a classroom you become very sensitive to the variety of backgrounds and experiences that make up the student group. You think carefully about the words you use and how they will impact on the feelings and future choices of the young people who are sitting in front of you. If I was teaching about different kinds of relationships and different models of family life, I would be acutely aware of the fact that the young people in my class could be being brought up by married biological parents; could be adopted, fostered or in care; could be being brought up by a single parent (single through choice, through abandonment, through bereavement); could have a gay parent or two gay parents; a trans-parent may have lost their parents; or may simply have two biological parents who co-habit, but never ‘tied the knot’. The last thing I would want to do is to stigmatise them, make them feel I am judging their family or pre-judging their future life based on their current family life. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens when people try to promote marriage above all other models of family life.
Telling these children that they are more likely to fail, because marriage is the only legitimate model for family life, that it confers some unique protection on children, and guarantees them an advantage in life, is hardly a good educational tactic is it? Whatever your moral or political beliefs about the benefits or otherwise of marriage over other kinds of relationships you have to think about whether stigmatising a student’s life experience is going to reap educational or emotional benefits.
Most parents do their level best to create a family and home in which children feel safe and loved, are motivated and supported to do their best in life and are healthy. Parents hope their children will find a loving partner and create a loving home for their grandchildren too. Talking about how to achieve this: what makes a child feel safe and loved, how to manage the challenges of parenting, how to make decisions about when/if to become a parent, and how to get the support all parents need to make a good go of it, are all vital parts of Sex and Relationships Education. Most people would agree that children thrive with certainty, security, boundaries, and consistency. With this in mind, exploring the concept of ‘stable relationships’ seems a really sensible approach. Telling a large proportion of our children that their families are inferior, failing or illegitimate because their parents/ carers aren’t married - or that they, as a result are disadvantaged and set up to fail - is just plain wrong.
It now transpires that conditions for funding for Free Schools and Academies obliges them to teach about the superiority of marriage and its importance in bringing up children, but apparently not other kinds of relationships or families. This new SRE formulation seems to have dropped the term ‘stable relationships’.
Why does that matter?
I think we can all think of examples of children being brought up by single or non-married parents who are happy and healthy and some who are damaged and vulnerable. We all know marriages that are destructive and that provide a bewildering and distressing context for family life as well as those that are safe and lovely. However, I will leave it for others to discuss the pros and cons of marriage itself and whether it is the societal panacea it is believed to be by some.
As an educator I am most concerned about classroom practice
When you work in a classroom you become very sensitive to the variety of backgrounds and experiences that make up the student group. You think carefully about the words you use and how they will impact on the feelings and future choices of the young people who are sitting in front of you. If I was teaching about different kinds of relationships and different models of family life, I would be acutely aware of the fact that the young people in my class could be being brought up by married biological parents; could be adopted, fostered or in care; could be being brought up by a single parent (single through choice, through abandonment, through bereavement); could have a gay parent or two gay parents; a trans-parent may have lost their parents; or may simply have two biological parents who co-habit, but never ‘tied the knot’. The last thing I would want to do is to stigmatise them, make them feel I am judging their family or pre-judging their future life based on their current family life. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens when people try to promote marriage above all other models of family life.
Telling these children that they are more likely to fail, because marriage is the only legitimate model for family life, that it confers some unique protection on children, and guarantees them an advantage in life, is hardly a good educational tactic is it? Whatever your moral or political beliefs about the benefits or otherwise of marriage over other kinds of relationships you have to think about whether stigmatising a student’s life experience is going to reap educational or emotional benefits.
Most parents do their level best to create a family and home in which children feel safe and loved, are motivated and supported to do their best in life and are healthy. Parents hope their children will find a loving partner and create a loving home for their grandchildren too. Talking about how to achieve this: what makes a child feel safe and loved, how to manage the challenges of parenting, how to make decisions about when/if to become a parent, and how to get the support all parents need to make a good go of it, are all vital parts of Sex and Relationships Education. Most people would agree that children thrive with certainty, security, boundaries, and consistency. With this in mind, exploring the concept of ‘stable relationships’ seems a really sensible approach. Telling a large proportion of our children that their families are inferior, failing or illegitimate because their parents/ carers aren’t married - or that they, as a result are disadvantaged and set up to fail - is just plain wrong.
Friday, 17 June 2011
Who are the new SRE Council?
Last month Care (Christian Action Research and Education) issued a press release to announce the launch of a new SRE council which has received support from Education Secretary Michael Gove. The release states that the council ‘has been formed to promote the best possible sex and relationship education both at home and at school, recognising the particular importance of enhancing the role played by parents in SRE.’ This blog takes a closer look at the groups involved and what their vision of ‘the best possible SRE’ might look like.
Lovewise
‘Lovewise is a charity which seeks to help schools and youth groups by providing presentations on the subjects of marriage, sex and relationships from a Christian perspective’.
Lovewise’s charitable objectives are to ‘advance the Christian faith...particularly (but not exclusively) the Biblical teaching on human sexuality, marriage and the complementary callings of man and woman’. A glance at their sample presentations for schools shows a shocking disregard for facts (for example claims that abortion causes infertility and breast cancer).
Evaluate
Evaluate ‘supports (young people) in delaying sexual experience until a long-term committed exclusive relationship’
Evaluate is an education programme run by Care, in connection with partner organisation Care Confidential (a network of independent pregnancy advice centres). Care’s charitable object is: ‘The advancement and propagation of the Christian gospel and in particular Christian teaching as it bears on or affects national and individual morality and ethics’. Care advocates for ‘an educated Christian view of life from its beginning at conception to its natural end’.
Challenge Team UK
‘The Challenge Team UK presents its message from a common sense and health perspective, without any religious references.’ That message is, ‘Saving sex for marriage is a positive, realistic and healthy lifestyle.’
Although Challenge Team rejects the term ‘abstinence’ for the work they do, they ‘promote(s) healthy sexuality by...suggesting that teens 'save sex for marriage' in order to stay healthy now and enjoy marriage later’. They claim that although ‘all of those involved in the Challenge Team so far have Christian beliefs’and that ‘The Challenge Team Trust Deed has a Christian basis’ none of the materials mention religion.
In line with many of the other organisations in this group Challenge Team take a dim view of current SRE practices: ‘By giving information about condoms and showing teens how to use them, adults who are the authority figures in teens' lives may be giving them, unintentionally, permission to have sex’.
Life
‘The most important and influential part of LIFE's ethos is our opposition to all abortion on principle.’
Life, which has also recently joined the government’s sexual health forum describes itself as non-religious. It advocates for ‘Our young people (to be) given a true sense of their self worth and a full appreciation of the importance of loving, stable and faithful relationships and has spoken out against contraception education and current SRE practices. This article evidences Life’s false claim that the morning after pill is an abortifacient.
Silver Ring Thing
‘There is only one true "Safe Sex" message and that must be the message of abstinence until marriage. Through this programme teens are able to understand that abstinence until marriage is not only God's plan for their lives, but also the best and only way to avoid the harmful physical and emotional effects of premarital sex.’
The UK’s Silver Ring Thing is an import from the U.S which teaches abstinence to young people who are encouraged to wear a silver ring as a symbol of their pledge to abstain from having sex until marriage. The website claims that: ‘the only way to reverse the moral decay of any youth culture is to inspire a change in the conduct and behaviour from those within the culture’ – youth volunteers are used to achieve this aim.
Family Education Trust
‘Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of children. Behind the innocuous-sounding words used by the sex education lobby, there is a definite agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards. The need for parents to be alert and vigilant has never been greater’.
The Family Education Trust produce literature campaigning against ‘modern’ methods of SRE arguing for a ‘clear moral framework that shows a proper respect for parents and for marriage.’ Lisa from EFC has blogged about one of their pamphlets aimed at young people here.
Right to Life
‘Right to Life is a political lobby group defending the right to life from conception to natural death’
This campaign group’s charitable aims include:
• Advancing the public’s education with a view to recognising the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death
• Provid(ing) relief...to young girls, in need of assistance and protection who may be under pressure to have an abortion.
Their educational worksheet on abortion can be seen here.
Some of these groups use the term ‘abstinence’ outright, some don’t. Many of them are anti-choice. Some use misinformation and false statistics. Many make statements which ostracise lesbian, gay and bisexual young people, or those who have/are single parents or are from 'non-traditional' families. But what they all share is a commitment to fighting any kind of ‘comprehensive’ SRE programme in which young people are given factual information about their rights and responsibilities and information on how to practice safer sex alongside advice on delaying sex until they are ready. The heavy push these groups make for heterosexual (often assumed to be Christian) marriage being the only valid context for sex is arguably offensive, and at best irrelevant to the lives of many young people in this country.
Lovewise
‘Lovewise is a charity which seeks to help schools and youth groups by providing presentations on the subjects of marriage, sex and relationships from a Christian perspective’.
Lovewise’s charitable objectives are to ‘advance the Christian faith...particularly (but not exclusively) the Biblical teaching on human sexuality, marriage and the complementary callings of man and woman’. A glance at their sample presentations for schools shows a shocking disregard for facts (for example claims that abortion causes infertility and breast cancer).
Evaluate
Evaluate ‘supports (young people) in delaying sexual experience until a long-term committed exclusive relationship’
Evaluate is an education programme run by Care, in connection with partner organisation Care Confidential (a network of independent pregnancy advice centres). Care’s charitable object is: ‘The advancement and propagation of the Christian gospel and in particular Christian teaching as it bears on or affects national and individual morality and ethics’. Care advocates for ‘an educated Christian view of life from its beginning at conception to its natural end’.
Challenge Team UK
‘The Challenge Team UK presents its message from a common sense and health perspective, without any religious references.’ That message is, ‘Saving sex for marriage is a positive, realistic and healthy lifestyle.’
Although Challenge Team rejects the term ‘abstinence’ for the work they do, they ‘promote(s) healthy sexuality by...suggesting that teens 'save sex for marriage' in order to stay healthy now and enjoy marriage later’. They claim that although ‘all of those involved in the Challenge Team so far have Christian beliefs’and that ‘The Challenge Team Trust Deed has a Christian basis’ none of the materials mention religion.
In line with many of the other organisations in this group Challenge Team take a dim view of current SRE practices: ‘By giving information about condoms and showing teens how to use them, adults who are the authority figures in teens' lives may be giving them, unintentionally, permission to have sex’.
Life
‘The most important and influential part of LIFE's ethos is our opposition to all abortion on principle.’
Life, which has also recently joined the government’s sexual health forum describes itself as non-religious. It advocates for ‘Our young people (to be) given a true sense of their self worth and a full appreciation of the importance of loving, stable and faithful relationships and has spoken out against contraception education and current SRE practices. This article evidences Life’s false claim that the morning after pill is an abortifacient.
Silver Ring Thing
‘There is only one true "Safe Sex" message and that must be the message of abstinence until marriage. Through this programme teens are able to understand that abstinence until marriage is not only God's plan for their lives, but also the best and only way to avoid the harmful physical and emotional effects of premarital sex.’
The UK’s Silver Ring Thing is an import from the U.S which teaches abstinence to young people who are encouraged to wear a silver ring as a symbol of their pledge to abstain from having sex until marriage. The website claims that: ‘the only way to reverse the moral decay of any youth culture is to inspire a change in the conduct and behaviour from those within the culture’ – youth volunteers are used to achieve this aim.
Family Education Trust
‘Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of children. Behind the innocuous-sounding words used by the sex education lobby, there is a definite agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards. The need for parents to be alert and vigilant has never been greater’.
The Family Education Trust produce literature campaigning against ‘modern’ methods of SRE arguing for a ‘clear moral framework that shows a proper respect for parents and for marriage.’ Lisa from EFC has blogged about one of their pamphlets aimed at young people here.
Right to Life
‘Right to Life is a political lobby group defending the right to life from conception to natural death’
This campaign group’s charitable aims include:
• Advancing the public’s education with a view to recognising the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death
• Provid(ing) relief...to young girls, in need of assistance and protection who may be under pressure to have an abortion.
Their educational worksheet on abortion can be seen here.
Some of these groups use the term ‘abstinence’ outright, some don’t. Many of them are anti-choice. Some use misinformation and false statistics. Many make statements which ostracise lesbian, gay and bisexual young people, or those who have/are single parents or are from 'non-traditional' families. But what they all share is a commitment to fighting any kind of ‘comprehensive’ SRE programme in which young people are given factual information about their rights and responsibilities and information on how to practice safer sex alongside advice on delaying sex until they are ready. The heavy push these groups make for heterosexual (often assumed to be Christian) marriage being the only valid context for sex is arguably offensive, and at best irrelevant to the lives of many young people in this country.
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