Former Teen Mom Bristol Palin Is Very Upset That Washington Teens Can Get IUDs

By Anna Merlan  |  October 9, 2015 | 3:20pm
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Bristol Palin, scion of Sarah Palin, seven months pregnant in an “I got ahead of myself” situation, is mad about birth control. Specifically, she is mad about Washington teenagers having access to low-cost, long-acting, reversible birth control like IUDs. OK, Bristol. Let’s do this. You really want to do this?

Palin’s latest blog, which we saw via Wonkette, is aflame with outrage over an IUD program that other right wing news outlets got angry about all the way back in July. (Bristol Palin’s blog is very odd, and its purpose as either a news source or a form of self-promotion is murky at best.) In any case, here she is:

Do you remember what it was like to be a 10 year old? I remember being an unabashed tomboy concerned with playing outside and acing 5th grade.
But life isn’t so innocent and carefree for some 10 years old in Washington State. This summer a report came out claiming that some schools in Washington were giving free birth control implants to children as young as 10 years old! These birth control devices are implanted in a girl’s uterus, and all of this can be done without a parent’s consent!

As Snopes pointed out way back in July, this was a big story for conservative news outlet CNS, which claimed Seattle sixth-graders couldn’t buy a soda to save their lives, while their school was running around willfully implanting their uteri with IUDs.

That is a rather aggressive misreading of an innovative program at Chief Sealth International High School, which gives students access to free and confidential birth control counseling, and yes, IUD insertion, if that’s the method they choose. State law in Washington— and 20 other states—says minors can receive reproductive healthcare without parental consent. The Chief Sealth program is partially funded by the Washington State Healthcare Authority, which runs a program called Take Charge, which offers family planning visits, including pap smears, prescriptions for birth control, condoms, IUDs, and even, for the Bristols among us, information on “natural family planning and abstinence.”

Palin refers to an organization called Judicial Watch, which found that hundreds of people have taken advantage of the Take Charge program between 2013 and 2015. That does include a handful of 10- and 11-year-olds: six in three years, compared with hundreds of clients who are 17, 18, and 19.

Palin and Judicial Watch see this an example of the free love advocating Big Government run amok and right into children’s uteruses. An alternate reading is that thousands of teenagers got access to confidential and factual birth control information. It’s unclear how many actually chose IUDs as their birth control method, but that, too, isn’t quite a cause for hand-wringing. A whole host of public health and medical organizations recommend them as the best and safest hormonal birth control choice for sexually active adolescents.

Not so in Bristol Palin’s alternate universe, where she refers to IUDs as “a controversial form of birth control that can have serious life-long side effects.”

A smaller person would comment here about glass houses.

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Palin promoting something or other in 2012. Photo via Getty Images

 
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