The Litmus Test Surgeon General Nominee Henry Foster Jr. Is Closely Allied With Planned Parenthood. And Its Policies, Cal Thomas Says, Are Fundamentally Flawed.
The nomination of Henry W. Foster Jr. to replace Joycelyn Elders as U.S. surgeon general is another sign that the Clinton administration has completely failed to understand the message of the last election. It continues to impose on this country people and policies rooted in a philosophy that has proved to be an utter failure.
Foster and the White House have been less than forthcoming about his views and how many abortions he has performed.
But there is more to this than misinformation and disinformation. Foster has close ties to Planned Parenthood, which has a view of sex and education that has exacerbated - not solved - one of the major problems our country faces. Planned Parenthood is not interested in changing sexual behavior but rather is most interested in helping people avoid the unwanted physical consequences of premature sex. Yet, one has to wonder why it has failed so miserably in achieving that objective.
California may be the best state to judge the results of the philosophy held by Planned Parenthood and its devotees, who include the nominee for surgeon general.
Mike Males, a graduate student in the doctoral program of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, has studied tabulations from the California Center for Health Statistics covering 46,500 births among school-age adolescents (18 years old and younger) in the state in 1993.
The statistics show two very different types of “teen” motherhood.
The first involves peer schoolboy partners, ages 18 and younger, who average about one year older than their girlfriends. These are the targets of the Elders-Foster-Planned Parenthood condom squads and the focus of the chastity vs. condoms war. Boys in this category accounted for about 13,400 births among schoolgirls in California in 1993 - only 29 percent of the total.
In 33,200 births among California girls ages 11-18 (71 percent of the total), the father was a post-high-school adult man averaging 22 years of age - five years older than the mother on average. These adult fathers are responsible for nearly threefourths of the 40,700 births among senior-high girls. And the adult men who father half the 5,900 babies born to junior-high girls (ages 11-15) average 22.1 years, 6 years older than their mothers.Also surprising is the fact that one-fifth of the babies fathered by schoolboys (about 3,000) were by adult, post-school women.
As Males notes, this isn’t about “children having children” or “teen motherhood.” It is adult sex with school-age youths.
For more than 30 years, Planned Parenthood and its disciples such as Elders and Foster have targeted elementary-school children with their brand of sex education.
But in California in 1993, elementary schoolboys fathered no children. Senior-high boys, though, were responsible for 41 percent of the births and adult men fathered more than 50 percent of babies born to girls between ages 11 and 15.
Numerous studies, including some by Planned Parenthood’s research arm, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, show that most “sexually active” girls under age 15 are victims of rape by substantially older men. Males writes it is a fact that “adolescents reflect adult values and behavior.”
We are deceiving ourselves when we think we can make adolescents behave differently from the irresponsible adults who surround them and who pump sex into everything from movies and television to music and advertising.
We would be far better off working to reduce the 71 percent figure (post-high-school adult men fathering children with teen-age girls) than focusing on the 29 percent figure (peer schoolboy partners).
Foster is Elders reincarnated. Her ideas have been proved not to work. His are just more of the same. We deserve a surgeon general who will focus on the real health needs of the country - not condone those whose behavior is detrimental to our society’s wellbeing. When is this administration going to get it?
xxxx PRO-CON Ellen Goodman and Cal Thomas offer conflicting views on Dr. Henry Foster’s nomination for U.S. surgeon general
Cal Thomas is an independent columnist distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.