Like French-tip pedicures, some things are just fundamentally wrong. Toenails should not grow long enough to be “tipped.” Similarly, semi-insane religious radicals should not be influential enough to infiltrate public opinion through the media.

But these are the times we are living in—a time of overgrown toenails and Fox News. So in the current debate about whether or not women should have control over their own bodies, people like Bill O’Reilly get to have their say.

O’Reilly jumped on the reckless media bandwagon last month and decided to pick on King Middle School in Portland, Maine. The school has a new health policy, which allows students to get birth control pills from school physicians confidentially. In a typically ignorant and inconclusive fashion, he decided that “giving the pill to sixth-graders is dumb.”

Alas, O’Reilly is misinformed. Or rather, he is misinforming. In a letter sent out to the parents of King Middle School children, Principal Michael J. McCarthy said that last year five students, who were 14 and 15-year-olds, “reported risky sexual behavior” to the school’s health center. One of those students ended up with a full-term pregnancy. I don’t know about the Fox News gang, but I’d rather have more 15-year-old birth control users than 15-year-old mothers.

O’Reilly chose the most extreme possibility and made it seem like sixth-graders everywhere are getting it on—as if all of a sudden sexual activity in preteens is an American epidemic. Really, most 11-year-old girls aren’t even at risk of getting pregnant because they haven’t even had their periods. The U.S. Department of Human Health Services said that the average age of menstruation in the U.S. is 12.

Contrary to what certain vicious talk-show hosts would have their audience believe, the King Student Health Center change is not a conspiracy attempt to hide important information from parents. In his letter, McCarthy pointed out that “if the student does not wish to inform their parent—the doctor is required by state law in Maine to keep the diagnosis confidential,” the same law would apply if the student saw a private physician. But first and foremost, parents have to sign a waiver simply to allow their children to receive the health services.

Parent notification aside, the bottom line is that the pill helps to prevent pregnancies. And the public would like to discourage middle school student pregnancies, right?

The so-called “pro-lifers,” whose nickname could switch to “freedom-stranglers” and still retain its meaning, seem to be the biggest advocates of teenage pregnancies. They don’t want women to take birth control or have the option of legal or safe abortions (relative to the back-alley abortions some women would have if Roe vs. Wade is overturned). Maybe they’re just nostalgic and want American life to be the way it used to be. Maybe they miss the time before women’s suffrage and reproductive rights, when men were lawfully allowed to hit their wives with an object no thicker than the width of their thumbs.

But the King Middle School controversy isn’t all about women’s rights, it’s equally about children’s rights. O’Reilly said that “secular progressives” have a desire to “empower children,” as if children who are possibly the most vulnerable human demographic in existence, can’t use all the support they can get. In this day and age, if support means giving birth control to teenagers responsible enough to ask for it, then give it to them.

That’s right folks, these are the times we are living in. Strange times, when teenagers are discouraged from safe sex practices and allowed to pick any kind of pedicure style they wish—just hopefully not French.