Here’s a fact for you: almost one half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. And another: it is estimated that more than half of all women in the United States will have an unintended pregnancy by the time they reach 45. And finally: more than seven in 10 teens report having had sexual intercourse by their 19th birthday.
These numbers alone—reported by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and cited in a recently released study by the Guttmacher Institute—speak to the importance of comprehensive sexual education and readily available birth control.
When we decided to create the “I Have Sex” video, we never could have imagined that the continued operation of our government might eventually hinge on the movement in which we were involving ourselves. Inspired by the Planned Parenthood rally in Exley and a conversation with filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler (’94), the 14 students originally involved in the “I Have Sex” project never intended to create anything more than a “warm-fuzzy” for the Wesleyan community.
We never expected to reach over a quarter-million people in the first week. We were unsure of whether the video would make Wesleying, let alone FoxNation.com, Mother Jones, and Rachel Maddow.
We figured that the statistics listed above alone would force Congress to drop the proposal to defund Planned Parenthood. After all, in addition to the sheer number of lives saved by cancer screenings, STD tests, and non-abortion-related health services Planned Parenthood provides, the money from the proposed cuts—$363 million—is spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan every three hours and 51 minutes. Defunding Planned Parenthood wouldn’t exactly balance the budget.
But the proposal to defund Planned Parenthood was never about fiscal responsibility. It was an ideological attack on our generation’s future.
Along with Planned Parenthood, the budget proposal included cuts to Federal Student Aid, the Department of Education, the EPA, and a host of other departments and programs that work to ensure equal opportunity for all citizens, regardless of background. And, just as these cuts threaten our generation’s ability to achieve as much and to progress as far as previous generations, cuts to Planned Parenthood jeopardize our generation’s ability to prevent unwanted pregnancies and make our own informed, safe, and responsible decisions about our own sexual activity.
Our video and the responses to it gave a face to the movement to protect Planned Parenthood. Its power came not so much from what we said, but from the fact that we were saying it. It was the overwhelming willingness of students from around the country to step in front of a camera and say that we—the young people of America—are sexually active, or will be sexually active, need Planned Parenthood, and will suffer from these cuts, that lifted the veil of anonymity, which had shielded the supporters of the cuts from those who would feel their impact. No longer are the victims faceless caricatures of sexual deviance and immorality, they are us—the nation’s future.
But our generation is the victim of much more than just the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and that must be made clear. Our parents and grandparents won’t be the ones to bear the burden of a desperately undereducated society; it will be us—and our children. Older generations won’t have to suffer the consequences of widespread pollution and environmental degradation; it will be our children and us. They won’t have to pay the price of massive tax breaks for corporations at the expense of vital social support programs aimed at preventing widespread poverty, hunger, and disease; we will. Their children—and grandchildren—will.
The fight to save Planned Parenthood is far from over. The organization may have survived this round of cuts, but new efforts to defund sexual health services will be launched during upcoming budget cut negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. New efforts to cut social support programs, education, transportation, NASA, disaster preparedness, and other programs from which we all benefit will also be launched—but again, no proposals to close corporate tax loopholes, stop corporate tax dodging, or end massive war spending appear to be forthcoming.
We must do more than just stand with Planned Parenthood. We must ensure that we are not faceless victims to another round of system-wide cuts. We must speak out and let our parents’ generation know that if they are going to continue to elect representatives that vote corporate welfare over social welfare, it is our future that will be compromised.
Eichengreen is a member of the class of 2013. Park is a member of the class of 2012.
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