On their Facebook page today, Planned Parenthood posted this New York Times op-ed written by a young man reflecting, as he takes his girlfriend Sam to buy the abortifacient hormone bomb known as the morning-after pill, upon his long fight to overcome his solid moral upbringing.
Student author Andrew Limbong, who grew up in a strict Christian family from Indonesia, describes his experience getting over moral scruple to have uncommitted sex (in accord with “Western ideals”) as the “ham sandwich effect,” or the unique spiritual gagging that occurs when sin is culturally shoved down one’s throat. He names the effect after a young Muslim friend who dared to eat a forbidden ham sandwich, the first of which he vomited out before the sense of repulsion was blunted after several attempts. (Planned Parenthood would call this experience when applied to sex as “staying true to one’s self and moving forward when you’re ready.”)
One important way to silence and surmount the protestations of one’s conscience and to have premarital sex, one friend told the author, is to stop treating your partner like a human being with value equal to your own:
His advice? Breathe a lot, do some push-ups and don’t really think about it. “Stop thinking about her as a person,” he told me. “People are animals, and having sex is a natural thing that animals do all the time.” …
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