The other day I asked my hairdresser about a box of money she had sitting on the counter. "Oh, my church is having a Walk for Life. I am taking donations." I'd noticed the poster with the baby on it, assuming it had something to do with cancer, but now realized the Life she was talking about wasn't as in curing disease but as in opposing abortion.

Sure enough, she continued to explain, "we have a hotline for pregnant women in crisis, and try to help them deal with being a single mother. And we also go into schools and teach abstinence instead of safe sex."

Periodically there are moments when I am so relieved to be a radical that it's almost palpable. Heck, it is palpable. I simply never want to be someone who says with a straight face that she teaches our children not to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy when they have intercourse and then refuses to support their decision to get an abortion when they get pregnant. 'Cuz I would feel like an idiot.

I waited for her to ask me to contribute and knew I would politely tell her the truth, that I have absolutely opposite views on these issues. I think abortion is wonderful and I think education should be used to spread information and not ignorance. For if you refuse to teach people how to prevent the exchange of bodily fluids, you are quite literally spreading ignorance, which can be defined as the absence of knowledge.

Some people like to think of the young as best kept innocent, which is another euphemism for ignorant, but I prefer to offer them information, including the fact that sex play can be super fun and life affirming, especially if done consciously and intelligently. The kind of shame her group spreads results in kids feeling the need to have furtive sexual encounters rather than calculated ones, and recent research backs up the fact that abstinent teens may wait longer to initiate sex but are also much more likely to have oral and anal sex and less likely to use condoms or get tested for disease.

Guess there's not really any such thing as an "abstinent" teen when you put it that way!

Anywho, she didn't ask me to support this cause. She knows I am a feminist, and may know that this includes my insane belief that we should use technology to manage birth rates particularly when the prospective mother says that would be the best option. Can't get more "life" affirming than that, from my perspective. But then I am a crazy person who believes that individual and familial and societal well-being is more important than coercive reproduction based on ancient myths that clearly were created to explain the unexplainable and control the superstitious.

I will say she is a rockin' good hairdresser, which is why I keep going back.