Is the New York Times really so desperate for anti-Trump, “let’s kill all the unborn babies” screeds that they have to dip into the high school newspaper pool? I saw this op-ed by a 16-year-old girl in The Salt Lake Tribune, which picked it up from the New York Times. There is no excuse for it. Titled, “I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft,” the piece is irresponsible to publish for many reasons:

• I don’t believe that it is likely to have been the 16-year-old’s work alone. I believe it was influenced by adults, and that they used her to promote their views, on the theory that “out of the mouths of babes” would have more persuasive power than “out of the mouths of pro-abortion extremists who believe nothing is more important than allowing mothers to kill unborn children.
• The named author, whose name I will not mention here so as to in some tiny way mitigate the harm this publicity is likely to inflict on her, is too young to give valid consent to being exploited in this manner. The op-ed is forever. She isn’t out of high school. She shouldn’t have to begin adulthood already branded as self-branded bigot, sexist, demonizer of a President and abortion activist.
• It would be a poor op-ed unworthy of publication if it were written by an adult.

Here are just a few excerpts to give you the spirit the thing:

1 “On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back….There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.”

Yes, and that’s because the boys have their priorities straight and are not insane. Any high school students who became emotionally upset by the result of the election have been abused by their parents, the media and the hysterical progressive culture. They are victims.

2. “We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control.”

I doubt that the  careful distinction included there between “found liable” and the usual “found guilty” came from the writer. Moreover, the statement is false: Nobody voted for Trump as someone who had been the victim of a politically-inspired and funded lawsuit because his opponent was a female, but at very least, because his opponent was an imp=competent, dishonest female who had no business running for President. Who framed the election that way? A 16-year-old can be forgiven for such reductionism, and that’s why we don’t usually have to read op-eds by 16-year-olds.

Women have complete control over their own bodies. What they don’t have is carte blanche to end the life of other bodies whose existence is inconvenient for them. This distinction may be too difficult for an indoctrinated 16-year-old to grasp, which, again, is why we don’t usually have to read op-eds by 16-year-olds.

3. “I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way it did abortion.”

The Trump Administration didn’t take away anything regarding abortion. The Tribune’s and the Times’ editors have an obligation not to allow outright falsehoods to be published even in opinion pieces. Using teens to mitigate the unethical nature of this practice is beneath contempt.

4. “I wish the consequences of this moment for young women punctured the apparent indifference of so many men and boys I saw that day. I wish they could breathe in what the women and girls I know have been inhaling since Nov. 5. I can’t predict how well I’m going to do on an English test tomorrow and I definitely can’t predict the future for me and my fellow young women. For now, all I can do is tell you how I feel.”

Again, this young woman is the victim of woke-abuse, child-abuse, and media-abuse. Nothing occurred in the election that adversely affects the future of any women, and the boys whom she sees as insensitive and inadequately caring are in fact being rational. The hysteria the op-ed expresses is something to be deplored, avoided, and perhaps treated clinically. For the Times to glorify it with a column like this shows desperation and a frightening ethics void.