Trickle-down stupidity?

OK, boys and girls, listen carefully. Unwed mother Bristol Palin has some advice for you on how to avoid getting in the "family way." Of course, it's abstinence, which worked so well for her. Bristol gave an interview to ABC's "Good Morning America" in which she said that she wishes she had waited to have sex. I'll bet she does. She also offered this startling bit of information: "I just think that abstinence is the only way you can effectively, 100 percent foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy." Hold the presses. Do you mean that if you don't do the horizontal hokey-pokey, you can't get pregnant? This should solve everything in the area of teen pregnancy, right? Wrong! Even Bristol's baby daddy, who looked like a deer in the headlights when he was paraded around the Republican National Convention and learned that he would be getting married, knows better than that. Levi Johnston, now estranged from Bristol, said abstinence is "not realistic." Smart boy, at least in that regard. "Abstinence is a great idea," Johnston said in an interview with "CBS This Morning. "But I also think you need to enforce, you know, condoms and birth control and other things like that to have safe sex. I don't just think telling young kids, ‘You can’t have sex,’ it's not going to work." Perhaps he didn't say it eloquently, but Johnston is right on the money. We can talk all we want about abstinence being the best bet for our children. It is. There's really no denying that. But the reality, which some find to be an inconvenient truth, is that unmarried young people have been having sex with one another since the dawn of time, and they will continue to do so in large numbers as long as humans walk the Earth. What we have to do, as responsible people, is find the best ways of helping these children protect themselves from pregnancy and disease, and if they foul up, we should make sure that they have access to the morning-after pill. No, it shouldn't be used as a routine birth-control measure, but if a couple of kids screw up, no pun intended, the rest of their lives should not be ruined (and many are undeniably altered for the worse by an unintended pregnancy) when a simple trip to the drugstore could prevent it. Telling kids to just say no to sex is about as effective as telling the ground not to get wet when it rains. If Bristol Palin, a girl from a stable, well-to-do, loving, two-parent family who no doubt had her mother in her ear preaching abstinence for years, goes ahead and has unprotected sex, what are the odds that a girl from a poor, single-parent home with little hope for the future is going to buck the odds and keep her drawers on? We need to help our kids, and ourselves, by offering them more than empty words.