Matt Garza sent a ridiculous tweet about birth control

Matt Garza is a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, but he’s a person just like the rest of us. He reads Twitter and has opinions on issues. Jessica Chastain is an Academy Award-nominated actress and film producer, and she also has opinions on current issues of the day. She decided to tweet her thoughts about what Congress has been up to lately, namely repealing the contraception mandate that had been part of the Affordable Care Act.

The second sentence of her tweet is essentially saying that by denying women access to contraception under their health insurance, the chances of women getting pregnant increases. And considering how poor family and maternity leave policies are in the USA, that keeps women out of the work force.

So you might be wondering what Matt Garza has to do with all of this. Well he had an opinion on Jessica Chastain’s opinion, and decided to tweet about it.

Since Garza is a human being, he’s allowed to have whatever opinion he wants. But he’s on exceedingly shaky ground if he’s going to publicly explain the virtues of abstinence to an adult woman, especially since he’s a man who doesn’t need to avail himself of birth control.

It seems like Garza might not know that contraception is used by more than just teenagers. Women of all ages use it for a variety of medical and health reasons, not just to prevent unintended pregnancy. It can be used to help with painful period-related cramps, to regulate a woman’s cycle, to treat premenstrual dysphoric disorder and polycystic ovary syndrome, and many other reasons. A Twitter user quickly educated Garza about her medical reasons for using birth control.

And Garza had a response.

It’s good that Garza saw his error and apologized. But despite that, it seems from Garza’s original tweet that he’s advocating for abstinence in all situations in which pregnancy isn’t the desired outcome, which is laughably ludicrous.

And to say that abstinence has been “forgotten amongst this generation” is, well, ridiculous. First, it’s not clear what generation he’s referring to. Is he talking about his own generation, millenials (Garza is 33), or is he talking about Chastain’s generation (she’s 39), or is he referring to the teenagers of today? It’s unclear, but no matter who he’s referring to, abstinence-only sex-ed has been around for a long time and is still prevalent around the country. It certainly hasn’t been forgotten.

For the record, Garza’s first child was born in 2002, when he was 18 years old. His second child was born in 2005. He and his wife, Serina, have been married since 2008. Garza has been vocal about preventing teen pregnancy, but apparently believes that abstinence is the only way to do it, even though he didn’t avail himself of that method. Abstinence-only sex-ed has proven to be absolutely disastrous in preventing both pregnancies and STDs, because it denies teenagers vital knowledge about contraception that can actually prevent pregnancy and the spread of STDs. Just ask the state of Mississippi about their “success” with abstinence-only sex-ed. Or talk to the Sexuality Education and Information Council of the United States, which has a lot of hard data on that topic.

Again, just because Garza is a baseball player doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have opinions, and it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t share them, either. He’s entitled to do both of those things, and that’s what he did here. But hopefully he realizes that as an MLB player, the things he says are looked at by an enormous audience, and subject to a lot more scrutiny than the opinion of a regular person. And while it’s definitely possible that Garza just wants to prevent anyone else from going through what he did as a teen parent, which is admirable, there are better ways to do that than posting a #justsaying lecture on Twitter directed at an adult woman.

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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher