Sometimes, lawmakers are just messing with our heads.
That must be the explanation for state Sen. Ed Reilly’s non-binding resolution that would ask school systems in Maryland to add “female monthly cycle tracking for adolescent girls” to the school health curriculum.
Reilly, whose views on reproductive health are based partly on his faith, knows this idea isn’t going anywhere. And even if it did pass, it is unlikely the Maryland Department of Education would add it to the health curriculum for schools.
On the surface, Reilly’s idea is that the more information young women have about their bodies the better for them. But what the Republican from Gambrills is really proposing is that schools introduce a type of birth control called Natural Family Planning — timing sex to take place when pregnancy is least likely to occur during the menstrual cycle.
There is nothing wrong with good information, but Reilly wants to goes a step further and would have schools show young girls how to practice this method.
His resolution opens the door to a messy debate about the difference between biology and ideas about reproductive health based on faith.
Natural Family Planning is one of the least effective forms of birth control. It works based on how well each woman tracks her cervical mucus and basal body temperature and can be effective if done diligently and correctly. It is the birth control approved by the Roman Catholic Church.
But the Mayo Clinic reports that as many as 23 out of 100 women who use natural family planning for birth control become pregnant the first year. And, it doesn’t offer protection from sexually transmitted infections.
Add in the vagaries of the teenage mind, with myriad distractions and all the normal documented tendencies for impulsive behavior, and teaching this in schools as a workable birth control method would result in a boom of unwanted pregnancies.
Reilly, no doubt, is convinced of the effectiveness of Natural Family Planning. He and his wife, a certified fertility care practitioner, used cervical mucus pattern charting for 23 years in their marriage as a means of family planning. He said he wishes they’d learned about it sooner.
But he knows the Democratic majority won’t go along with this. And, we suspect, most of his Republican colleagues in the state Senate know it too.
How else can you explain that no one was willing to sign on as a co-sponsor to this resolution? They didn’t want to waste their time.
Opponents were quick to hurl a ready insult at this idea, calling it something from the “Handmaiden’s Tale.” Margaret Attwood’s book, and the current TV series by the same name, described a dystopian future where women are treated as chattel whose reproductive systems are tracked for state purposes.
So, Reilly’s real purpose was to play a game. He wound up his political opponents and watch them run around shouting about the unfairness of his legislation.
He did it under the guise of someone concerned about improving the lives of teenage girls. He posed it as an innocent effort to discuss widening their education about their bodies.
When all along, he must have known this was going nowhere.
Reilly was just messing with our heads.
