A bit of latex in your mouth for a couple minutes: gross.

Herpes sores or genital warts in your mouth for the rest of your life: grosser.

Dunno. I mean, winding up with an STD hanging out in your throat seems grosser, but yes, using a regular, non-flavored latex condom (never mind any agents used to lubricate it) sounds like it would taste pretty horrible. But! If you make the condoms actually flavored, people might start having too much oral sex, and then civilization would crash and burn, leaving the survivors plunged into a godforsaken hellscape where prenatal care is free and readily available, thorough and accurate sex education is the law of the land, and cheap, convenient contraception options have all but eliminated the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies. The alternate theory–that the author doesn’t realize those condoms being scented is a byproduct of them being flavored–is just unthinkable.

Ultimately, I think the problem is the facts steadfastly refusing to be what the anti-choice brigade would like them to be.

“And I’m still not sure what scented condoms are for.”

My guess? They want to encourage people to use condoms during oral sex without encouraging it too much, lest somebody get a bad case of the vapors.

And I’m still not sure what scented condoms are for.

The closest abortion provider for me is not a Planned Parenthood, and none of the Planned Parenthoods of Metropolitan New Jersey (where I’m from) or Greater Northern New Jersey provide abortions. These PPs serve 10 counties in total, and none provide abortions. They all refer, which in the minds of the antis, is just as bad as performing the abortions. But I guess in the minds of the antis, it’s better to lie than to tell the truth and pass it off as equally bad.

The last time anyone I knew had an abortion and shared details of her experience, she reported getting an extremely strong pitch for the whole nine yards. She was the sort of patient where it would have seemed necessary, though. She had a very low level of self-care–high number of casual sex partners, infrequent condom use, no alternate form of contraception, occasional tests for HIV but no other STD screening, no prior pap smears–so it seems kind of like a no-brainer that a clinic would take the opportunity to encourage safer practices and screening for related problems. Someone whose routine care was more regular and thorough might have a very different experience.

‘sarright. It can be difficult to properly express facepalmitude in text without getting a little ambiguous sometimes. Articles like this really should be satire. It’s like “The nerve of Planned Parenthood, trying to bill packets designed to prevent future abortions as anything but abortions!”

The pregnancy test thing in particular just struck me as rocking out with a serious case of either privileged ignorance or bad faith. Or maybe the lady’s posting from an alternate reality where you still have to pee on a frog if you want to figure out if you’re pregnant without going to the doctor.