NWLC’s Weekly Roundup: November 28 – December 2

Welcome to December! As usual, we’ve got another end-of-the-week roundup for you. This week: stories on teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. and sex education, pondering whether or not Apple’s Siri is pro-choice or anti-choice, ways to find a mentor, some new videos in the NWLC library, and this week’s HERvotes blog carnival. 

Over the weekend, The Abortioneers published a blog post pointing out that Siri, the “personal assistant” feature in the new Apple iPhone 4s, doesn’t seem to be able to find information about abortion and abortion clinics. Siri even seems to have difficulty helping people find information about birth control and contraceptive services. What’s even more troubling to pro-choice advocates is that in some cases, Siri actually directs the iPhone user to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers.

Many have noted that Siri was programmed with a sense of humor. That she’s meant to be a bit sassy. But now some are also asking, is Siri anti-choice?

After all, Siri can find you Viagra. Siri can find you an escort. Siri can tell you where to go if your ED medication is working overtime but in this example, she can’t find a health care clinic that offers reproductive health services, including abortion, even with very specific information.

Personally, we don’t think Siri was deliberately coded to be anti-choice. And while I’m a little off put by the tone of this blog post, I tend to agree with it. To me it seems like this can be chalked up to an oversight in programming. Apple is certainly aware of the issue now, and as Siri is in beta and as Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in response that, “we can do better and we will in the coming weeks,” we feel comfortable predicting that this will be remedied. If not, then Apple will have a lot of explaining to do.

Of course, then there’s always Stephen Colbert’s take, which – in true Colbert fashion – is as ridiculous as can be.

On another reproductive health note, there’s some good news from the Guttmacher Institute today! They’re reporting that the teen birth rate declined between 2009 and 2010, and the drop can “be linked almost exclusively to improvements in teens’ contraceptive use.” So, apparently if you teach teens about contraceptives and how to use them, they’ll actually use them (sometimes even dual methods! How responsible!) and fewer teens will get pregnant. In other seemingly-obvious news, researchers at the University of Georgia are the latest to debunk abstinence-only sex education. They came out against abstinence-only education this week after analyzing pregnancy data from 2005 (which is the most recent year for which this kind of data is available) and concluding that “states that mandate abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools have higher teenage pregnancy and birth rates than states that have more comprehensive programs that also teach other ways to prevent pregnancy.” Go figure!

Okay – so on a non-reproductive health note, here’s a how-to guide from Jezebel on “How To Get And Keep A Mentor.” Previously I’ve shared stories on how important it is for women to have mentors and how women sometimes lack examples of strong mentor-mentee relationships. I’m glad to see this guide surface – it’s great to have some help figuring this out, given how important a mentoring relationship can be.

My favorite tip from this piece is to “think of mentoring as something that can take a lot of different shapes, formal or informal, [so] it can be a lot less intimidating to seek out a mentor.” The word “mentor” conjures up a formal, acknowledged working relationship to me. While that’s definitely a great way to go if it suits both people, it’s good to keep in mind that mentoring can come in more informal ways, too.

Two last quick items: We wanted to make sure you saw that we’ve uploaded more videos from our 2011 Annual Awards Dinner, including this amazing video of five of the women Freedom Riders we honored being interviewed by NPR’s Michel Martin:

And we also wanted to thank all the bloggers who participated in this week’s HERvotes blog carnival on the potential expansion of the religious refusal clause concerning contraceptives in the new health care law. We’ve collected a few blog posts to get you started reading, and the full list of blog posts can be found here.

Alright! That’s all for this week. As always, if there’s something interesting you’ve read this week and would like to share, remember to leave a link in the comments!