For some goddamn reason, former teen dad, father of six, and Brewers pitcher Matt Garza is saying some shit about abstinence-only education on Twitter.
Garza responded to a tweet by actress Jessica Chastain that addressed the slimy overnight dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, which will once again put women in the shitty position of having to pay high prices for contraception and basic health care. Chastain pointed out that contraception is essential to keeping women in the workforce, to which Garza espoused some bullshit about how abstinence is the “best contraceptive.”
None of this is all that surprising, considering Garza once ran around with Bristol Palin talking about teen pregnancy.
You don’t need me to tell you this because you aren’t a moron and your name isn’t Matt Garza, but here it is anyway: Abstinence-only education leads to more unplanned pregnancies, largely because it sends young people out into the world without any real sense of how sex, sexuality, venereal diseases, consent, and contraception works.
Promoting abstinence doesn’t keep people from having sex, and Chastain is absolutely correct: saddling women with unplanned pregnancies often restricts their economic mobility, can trap them in bad relationships, can require social services to keep their family afloat, and yes, increases the rate of abortion.
I could go on about this forever, but the reality is that no amount of data about declining teen pregnancy rates, the correlation between access to contraception and abortion rates, or the correlation between access to women’s health clinics and sexual health will change Garza’s mind. Given his past behavior, one might conclude that his problem isn’t that he’s ill-informed, but that he simply doesn’t have much respect for women.