Okay, maybe we don't have to move to Canada after all. Maybe we'll just move to Maine. In a country full of people promoting abstinence-only "sex" education even for people old enough to fight in freakin' Iraq, we are in shock that this happened, but it did: A school board in Portland, Maine, just approved a plan to offer the birth control pill to students in grades 6 through 8. (And the vote didn't even squeak by either: it was a landslide ten to two.) The decision came after Portland's middle schools reported 17 pregnancies in the last 4 years. The school's health center will also provide STD counseling. Parents have to sign a permission slip granting their children access to the health center, but once the kids are inside, all treatment is confidential, so it's up to the students how much of the visit they share with their parents. Now, don't get us wrong: the idea of 11-year-olds having sex scares the shit out of us. (We were barely playing kiss-chase at that age!) But the idea of 11-year-olds getting pregnant or contracting an STD scares the shit out of us even more.

And can we all please now agree that educating kids about sex and even offering them condoms or birth control doesn't make them more likely to do it? Peer pressure makes them more likely to do it. Booze makes them more likely to do it. But prophylactics? Not so much. Though it'd be kind of nice if that were the case, wouldn't it? If guys got boners thinking about condoms, if women got all horny thinking about how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, if couples wanted to tear each other's clothes off after asking each other about their sexual health? Well, two sex advice ladies can dream, can't we?