Aging & Wisdom Quote by Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Wasserman Schultz frames a policy fight as a moral inversion: the real danger, she argues, isn’t sexual health education but the attempt to keep it out of reach. The rhetorical move is classic political jiu-jitsu: take the opponent’s emotionally loaded verb, “harming,” and flip it back on them by replacing panic with competence. “Harming” becomes a smear; “educating” becomes a civic duty.

The repetition does the work. “We are not... We are...” isn’t just emphasis, it’s a rebuttal staged as certainty. She’s speaking into a cultural script where young women’s autonomy is treated as suspect, where “protecting girls” often functions as a proxy for controlling sex, access, and decision-making. By insisting on “take charge of their health,” she recasts contraception and health literacy as self-management, not moral transgression. It’s a deliberately non-sensational vocabulary: health, information, throughout their lives. That’s the point. She’s trying to drag the debate from the symbolic battlefield of virtue and shame into the practical world of outcomes.

“Arming them” is the sharpest word here, and it’s not accidental. It borrows the language of conflict to acknowledge the reality: young women are navigating institutions, partners, and politics that may not have their interests at heart. Information becomes not just empowerment-speak but defense. In context, it reads as an answer to abstinence-only arguments and contraception restrictions: if knowledge is framed as threat, then withholding it is the actual harm.