I was shocked the first time I saw a pregnant teenager. I was in the ninth grade, and a girl I had known for three years came back from summer vacation with a big, hard belly. She walked the halls quietly with her dark eyes downcast, making sure to not to speak what was already obvious. I’d heard about teenagers having unprotected sex and getting pregnant, but I’d never seen a real live 14-year-old mother-to-be. It was surreal.

After that, pregnancies were no longer surprising at my Gulfport, Mississippi, school. Upperclassmen and freshmen, white and black, popular and not-so-popular girls grew bellies. The most seemingly innocent girls in school disappeared from the social scene only to return with child or with adoption rumors swirling over their heads. Some even came back with husbands, but that was rare.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mississippi had 55 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2010, 60 percent higher than the U.S. average. Having seen so many young pregnant women during my high school years–their college dreams stalled, their families further strained–it pains me to know that teenage girls in Mississippi may no longer have the option to terminate their pregnancy if that’s what they decide is best for them.  HB1390, a law signed in April that would require a facility’s physicians to have admitting privileges at a local hospital and be board-certified obstetrician-gynecologists, in effect ends abortion entirely in the state. Because such privileges are tough to acquire, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic left, would be shuttered.

While U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III continues to block the law thus keeping the clinic open for now, I feel it may all be for naught. Gov. Phil Bryant couldn’t care less about not having a place for women to seek safe abortions in the state, and Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves thinks the law “protect[s] women.” Neither of them seem to have considered that low-income, mostly black women are the ones who will suffer from this law. And even though my old Southern Baptist church is home to many of these women, I can’t help feeling that everyone is dancing in the pews. They’re not only “protecting” women’s rights, but God’s plan. That’s not easy to fight with.

Abortions are certainly not the only answer for unexpected pregnancies, but it would be a disgrace, to say the least, if Mississippi women lose that option entirely. It’s already enough that women have to travel to the state’s capital for the procedure–driving 200 miles away to Alabama, Louisiana, or Tennessee puts even more financial strain on families.

High school students have enough to contend with as it is. The GOP-led Mississippi legislature, however, doesn’t seem to care. They’re doing what they think is divinely ordered, a noble cause to save all of God’s precious unborn children. Sadly, impoverished girls and women will foot the bill.

The Utah Supreme Court this week reversed the conviction of Warren Jeffs for his role in the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Viewing the facts of the case through the prism of Utah’s religious history reveals an ugly picture indeed.

Warren Jeffs helped run a small Mormon sect called the “Fundamentalist” LDS that is not a part of Utah’s dominant Mormon establishment, the LDS. Elissa Wall spent her entire childhood being brainwashed by this sect; recordings of Jeffs’ teachings were broadcast throughout her home on a speaker system. When Elissa was twelve, she discovered what happens to people who defy the FLDS prophet: her father’s disobedience was punished by having his family stripped from him and sent to another city, where her mother was “married” to an FLDS leader who already had several other wives.

When Elissa was fourteen, Jeffs ordered her to marry her nineteen-year-old first cousin, Allen Steed. According to the opinion, Elissa was aghast, and flatly refused to go forward with the wedding. Even her older sisters, who were already married to the reigning FLDS prophet, tried to plead her cause, but to no avail. At the time of the wedding, a devastated Elissa refused to say “I do” – but Jeffs pushed and pushed, until she finally mumbled “Okay, I do.” Jeffs then proclaimed “Now go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good priesthood children,” at which point Elissa ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

When Elissa resisted her husband’s sexual advances over the following weeks, Jeffs gravely informed her that she had to “repent” and be “submissive” – she “needed to go home and give [her]self to [Steed], who was [her] priesthood head and husband, mind, body, and soul and obey without any question.” Allen proceeded to rape Elissa repeatedly over the next two years.

Jeffs was charged as an accomplice to rape, which is defined as any sexual intercourse where the victim “expresses lack of consent through words or conduct,” or where the victim is younger than eighteen and a perpetrator who is more than three years older “entices or coerces the victim to submit.” It makes no difference whether the parties are married – though that’s irrelevant here, because no marriage license was ever issued. The accomplice liability statute is equally blunt: “Every person … who solicits, requests, commands, encourages, or intentionally aids another person to engage in conduct which constitutes an offense shall be criminally liable as a party for such conduct.”

I have now read the court’s opinion several times, and I must confess that I simply can’t follow the logic. Maybe you can. It seems to say that Jeffs lacked the “mental state” to cause a nineteen-year-old to have sex with a fourteen-year-old, even though that’s exactly what he ordered them to do, over the girl’s most strenuous objections. My purpose here is not to debate the legal reasoning, but to paint the religious background that I believe contributed to a bizarre result.
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Recently, St. Louis-area junior high school students Tori Shoemaker and Cheyenne Byrd were suspended for two days because they wore home-made t-shirts that read “safe sex or no sex.” The shirts were decorated with condoms, and were meant to protest the school’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum. The students said their shirts were a form of free speech, but a superintendent said that the shirts were inappropriate and a distraction at school (so, apparently free speech is only permissible when appropriate). Watch the CNN report here.

Haven’t we seen this kind of thing before, with students punished for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam war? In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that symbolic speech and political expression were protected under the First Amendment. How are Shoemaker and Byrd’s t-shirts any different from those black armbands, to which the 1969 ruling applied? As the Court wrote, “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Bill O’Reilly’s producers were setting up the car pickup and hair and makeup for me (yes, I get the star treatment when I appear on Fox), when they stopped to ask me why I disagreed with O’Reilly about a chastity ring with biblical verse being religious in nature.

You see, a girl in London was not allowed a religious exemption from their uniform policy of “no jewelry” in school. The English court held that the chastity ring was not a religious symbol. The ring was part of the Silver Ring Thing program, which your tax dollars have previously supported to the tune of over a million dollars. Yes, our Congress paid for this religious proselytizing in U.S. public schools, until they agreed to stop such funding after a challenge from the ACLU. Like many other abstinence-until-marriage sex ed programs, this one was theologically based.

When I explained that I agreed with the ACLU and not the London court, I was told they would need to bump me in favor of a guest who would argue that the ring was not religious. But I wonder if it gives Bill O’Reilly pause to note that on this specific part of the issue, he is on the side of the ACLU and the Secular Coalition for America.

When is sex ed really Bible study? Only a few years ago, certain federally funded abstinence-only courses were discovered to have, in their curriculum materials, bible quotes requiring girls to be subservient to their husbands. Even without the quotes, federally funded abstinence-only courses are still telling all students that the only way to express one’s sexuality is to remain abstinent until they marry someone of another gender. Regardless of your individual feelings about this teaching, it is a theological requirement, not the factual basis of a health class or sex education.

Sure, comprehensive sex ed will always include the positive aspects of abstinence–it is the only foolproof way to avoid unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases—but including that along with other factual information is a lot different than preaching abstinence-until-marriage as the only way to deal with one’s sexuality. And it certainly does nothing for the approximately 10% of students who are likely to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender except make them even more invisible and discounted than they already are in our society.

It’s not that sex isn’t always on my mind, but this has been an especially “hot” subject in Congress this particular week, as the House Appropriations Committee gets set to vote on how much money to throw at these abstinence-only programs.