Nita Lowey: “Mr. Chairman, each year publicly funded family planning prevents 386,000 unintended pregnancies to teenagers, it…”

“Mr. Chairman, each year publicly funded family planning prevents 386,000 unintended pregnancies to teenagers, it prevents 155,000 teenage births, and it prevents 183,000 abortions. If we are going to stand here and try to say with a straight face that parental notification of birth control is going to prevent teenagers from having sex, we are living in an Ozzie and Harriet world that has not existed in this country, if it ever existed, for 40 or 50 years. If we want to prevent these unintended pregnancies, if we want to prevent unintended disease and if we want to prevent all of these things from happening, we need to have family planning service. I happen to believe, as all of us do, that children should not have sex as teenagers and that we should teach abstinence-based sex education to our teenagers. But let us be realistic. Parental notification is not going to stop teenagers from having sex. What it will do is take that chart that has been shown by the proponents of the Istook amendment throughout the afternoon and evening and it is going to take that line that shows increased unwanted teenage pregnancies and it is going to put that line right off the top of that chart. That is not what any of us want here today.”