What should we call a nine year-old girl that menstruates?

shouldnt there be a better way to define the rights of these girls?

i just don't think parent-rights ought to trump the rights of fertile underage girls. Girls who could potentially become mothers should not be given the 'sex erasing' moniker of children.

The word child negates the potential of their sexuality, fertility and ultimately their reproductive rights.

except of course any "mom-in-question" which in such a case is the 9-year-old, not HER mother.

And absolutely, yes! it's the rights of the girls we need to define better, not merely their "labels" (I HATE labels for this very reason, they always limit one's possibilities imo)

When Florida had the parental notification initiative on the ballot, I did a PBS interview with my teen daughter, agreeing that under law of course the mother needed to know everything, but that the mother whas the underage girl! HER mother was the potential GRANDmother -- who had no rights to any decisions, that becoming a GRANDmother or not isn't something one decides for oneself! So every mother I ever knew didn't need this law to know she was pregnant, so it was misnamed or really stupid and sly, which was it?

They looked at me like I was completely crazy, like this had never, never been said before and thus coiuldn't possibly make any sense.

But doesn't it - shouldn't we call those stupid proposals the GRANDPARENTAL NOTIFICATION ACT-OUT, or something? Maybe we should talk about that? I'm thinking that whole paradigm shift could be a way through this - I think what I'd vote most passionately NOT to call a fertile 9-year-old would be "chattel" or "vessel" or God forbid "rape victim," much less instrument of her own mother's domination or beliefs --

OTOH, we don't want to go where Dr. Reich goes with his insidious "ethical servility": argument against loving parents home-educating, either.

How can it be so hard to see what love looks like, and what's a big con?

See Sunday's NYT for a review of the new sociology book, "When Sex Goes to School." I quote:

Luker, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the landmark book “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood” (1984), has been talking to activists for and against sex education for a somewhat astounding 20 years, and at this point probably knows what they’re thinking better than they do.

In “When Sex Goes to School” (a cheesy title, but never mind), she argues that the fight over sex education is no mere bread-and-circuses distraction from the so-called real issues. Nor are our differences of opinion minor fractures in the social body. We can’t agree about sex education because we can’t agree about sex, and the way in which we disagree about sex has everything to do with how we’re breaking apart as a nation.

Luker identifies Americans’ competing visions of sexuality as “liberal” and “conservative,” but even she acknowledges that those terms are too flabby to nail down our real differences. More muscular terms, it seems to me, would be “naturalist” and “sacralist.”

Naturalists, whom Luker calls sexual liberals, hold that sex is natural and unmysterious, a healthy, pleasurable, quasi-recreational activity. Sacralists, whom Luker calls sexual conservatives, consider sex sacred but dangerous, transformative when contained by marriage but destructive outside it.

It will be a war no matter how we approach it --

Here's why, with a cover image of the book I mention above, uploaded here to the Kitchen.

But Oh Bother, I still can't figure out how to get it to just show up in my comment. My education's obviously not yet complete . . .