Florida’s “Don’t Say Period” Law Harms Girls
Florida lawmakers have initiated a restrictive, cruel law that ignores girls’ real-world health and family needs
Let’s take things back to 1920 when no one talked about menstruation or where babies come from, shall we?
My grandmother told me that when she became pregnant with my mother, her new husband, my biological grandfather Bob Roberts, brought her some tea and told her, “Drink this, you won’t have to worry about the baby.”
Fortunately for both my mother and me, she realized what he meant and declined the beverage.
I live in Florida and I’ve watched as our governor Ron DeSantis has led the passage of many laws restricting what public schools can teach, especially in the area of human sexuality.
Back in April of this year, the Florida state legislature passed a law that’s informally called the “Don’t Say Period” law. It restricts schools from teaching “sex education” prior to 6th grade.
This would seem a small matter compared to the 6-week abortion ban that, along with the “Don’t Say Period” law, took effect in Florida last week.
But the “Don’t Say Period” law is almost insanely cruel and unrealistic.
The combined negative effects of our disturbed food, health systems, and culture have led to millions of girls getting their periods much earlier than 6th grade. There are certainly many thousands of Florida girls starting their periods before age 12.
I do understand that men like DeSantis and the individuals he caters to do not care that a little girl could be playing with Barbie dolls and discover blood on her underwear.
That’s what happens. I was an unspoiled young teen who didn’t understand what the perverts who hung around my dad’s house were saying or doing when making sexual advances. I was in 7th, not 6th grade and playing with Barbies with my girlfriend when my own period started. Yes, I still played with Barbies in 7th grade. After my period? Not so much.
I don’t know how old my friend “Marcy” from my sexual assault peer support group was when she started her period. But I do know that Marcy was in 6th grade when her hapless mother took her to the emergency room with severe stomach pains. At the hospital, they quickly determined she was pregnant and in labor. She gave birth to twin daughters. They never found out whether the girls’ biological father was Marcy’s father or grandfather. Her father was charged with child sexual abuse, convicted, and incarcerated. The grandfather was never charged and continued to abuse until his death from a stroke. Her mother, who was well-aware that her husband and father were raping her daughter in a shed on their property, was also never charged.
A book on basic sex education might have helped Marcy before she was taken to the hospital on that fateful day. But she didn’t have one and the school didn’t want to help either: she was sent to a continuing education school with delinquent criminal kids. But Marcy was the victim, not the perpetrator, of an unspeakable crime.
The Florida law re-offends against girls
Here’s the reality for young girls and menarche. Florida has set a law that it believes will accommodate most young girls who are starting their periods. They were likely to have been using outdated, inaccurate information because the official medical community appears unwilling to recognize that girls are getting their periods at younger and younger ages, starting in the 1970s.
The American Academy of Pediatrics offers a public resource article written in 2003 (20 years ago — but currently featured) that says “Less than 10% of U.S. girls start to menstruate before 11 years, and 90% of all U.S. girls are menstruating by 13.75 years of age.”
That’s about the age I started my period: way back in 1975. It’s also about the same age as my daughter started: back in 2005.
But when my daughter started 4th grade in 2000, she began to develop small breasts. Alarmed, I took her to the pediatrician, who said, “I’m not surprised. I have patients who are 7 and 8 years old starting their period.”
The doctor told me his theory of why children were starting their periods at increasingly younger ages: hormones in milk. I concluded it must be “hormones in everything” and switched my daughter to organic meat, milk, fruits, and vegetables whenever possible. I didn’t use plastic bottles or containers either, having heard about BPA and PET, estrogen-mimicking chemicals.
As a result, my daughter continued her normal childhood until reaching the normal age of menarche, along with her friends.
According to a group of pediatricians writing in StatPearls, “Menarche typically occurs between the ages of 10 and 16, with the average age of onset being 12.4 years.” Average in this sense doesn’t mean anything but math. Millions of girls are starting their periods before 6th grade.
In the U.S., children typically start kindergarten at age 5. This means they will be age 10 in 5th grade and 11 in 6th grade. At least 10 to 20% of the 6th grade girls in Florida schools will have already started their periods before their schools are allowed to provide education about menstruation.
What do Florida’s legislators think should be done when a 4th grade child is playing on the playground with friends and blood appears on her underwear?
Who talks to the child? Who talks to the friends?
Children don’t need detailed books explaining every aspect of human sexuality at young ages. But they do need health information that they can understand that is appropriate to their age. As a textbook and test writer for educational publishers, I am able to determine what level and type of information, as well as language, can be offered to children in areas that could be controversial or frightening.
And that’s what I felt when I saw blood on my underwear. I was terrified. I knew I’d started my period but what came next? I didn’t know how long it would last, how much blood there would be, and I also didn’t understand the strange pains I felt in my tummy.
Of course since then, it’s been a life of pains in my tummy.
But at a young and unsophisticated age 13, that’s where I was.
My girlfriend was a little jealous as she did not start hers for several more months.
I have a friend who recently retired from being a librarian at our local high school. She said, “Parents just drop their kids off in the morning and that’s it. They don’t want to see or hear from them and expect the school to take care of them.”
I was a community college teacher for 20 years and I assisted my young and older adult students in many ways. At Palomar College, I gave students a 10 minute break so hungry ones could go to the student resource center and get nutritious food that volunteers brought from their own gardens.
To the types of people that DeSantis draws his support from, a volunteer-stocked small refrigerator that offers free food to hungry students is a bad thing. This type of person sees mutual care and support for others, common sense, and an interest in well-being as something evil.
But they are the same people that looked the other way when my long-ago friend Marcy gave birth to twin daughters at age 13. They are the people who chose to only prosecute Marcy’s father and leave her and the twins in the same home as her equally-offending grandfather and abusive mother.
I’ll never forget the day that Marcy, in tears, spoke about how much it hurt that her mother blamed her for what her father and grandfather had done to her.
And then she talked about how she got a job at age 16 and moved out with her twin daughters. She had no choice, she said, because her grandfather was getting interested in them.
Actually, I often think of Marcy’s situation, as she raised her daughters alone and took excellent care of them.
Marcy, to my knowledge, never had a normal love relationship with any man. Her life revolved around her daughters. She always said that if she’d known she was pregnant from being raped by her father and grandfather, she would have declined an abortion because she loved her daughters so much and they loved her. Both were, fortunately, healthy and able to go on to full, normal lives despite the terrible way they started out.
This isn’t an anti-abortion statement on my part or Marcy’s. That’s what ultra-right-wingers think. They think of others in the same way as the owners of Tyson Chicken and Smithfield Pork think of the animals they factory-raise as food.
It’s a pro-choice statement.
And Ron DeSantis and his ultra-conservative friends who want to farm humans like chickens, pigs, and cattle — they may well get what they want. More Marcys — more babies born to young teens from sexual abuse and cruelty.
It wasn’t a book about basic sex education that led to Marcy becoming pregnant at age 12 from incestuous sexual abuse.
It was the lack of one.
I worked in a women's clinic. Facts often not included in sex education classes--females can be impregnated before they've begun their period and penetration is not required for transmission of semen or STDs. You can get pregnant the day after you stop taking the pill. You can get pregnant during your period. I am glad your friend Marcy had the strength to create a healthy home for herself and her children. And isn't it awful to think that she was the most mature, sane, and loving person in her entire family before she became a teenager?
After nearly 50 years of intense, relentless work, the fascists and sociopaths are getting their way. The populace is too poor, harried, and divided to do anything about it but shrug between school shootings.
The librarian's comment rings far too true, as the pandemic proved. I'm baffled why most people have kids. Status symbols? Just hormones/instinct/their program running? Even as a kid it was clear most adults didn't want anything to do with kids. The kind old characters in kid's TV shows I'd never seen in real life.