beautymark75 member for 18 weeks 1 day

I have just about had it with the hysteria brewing over the 17 pregnant teens from Glouceter, Mass. I am amazed that people are treating a group of pregnant teenagers as an "epidemic" that needs to be cured. Before I get into the reasons why I think this is an unfounded, irrational, knee jerk reaction to an isolated situation I want to preface this blog with a few things first.

1. I do not think it is wise for 15 year old single young women to have babies.

2. I do not advocate on behalf of those who wish to have casual sex before they are aloud to vote, drive a car, or hold a full time job.

3. I do not think it is a good idea to have a child before you have reasonably and informatively explored your future educational and vocational options.

4. I do not support or condone statutory rape nor do I think it wise for a high school age person to have sex with a 24 year old homeless person.

With that said, I'd like to share the rest of my thoughts, that I am almost certain will be met with a firestorm of disagreements, but that is okay. That is what we are here for.

For one, teenage pregnancy is not a new thing, and most of us realize that. My mom got pregnant with me at 18 while finishing her senior year in high school in 1975 and I have an aunt who got pregnant at age 15 in 1979. Without a doubt there was a stigma attached to being an unwed, pregnant teen, but I am willing to bet that if they had been married (well not my aunt so much) then the problem or controversy would not have existed. My mom married my dad when she was 5 months pregnant, and my aunt was sent away to a Catholic home for pregnant girls. The cure for teen pregnancy then was marriage or seclusion.

Back a little further, my grandmother was married at 17. She had her first child at 18, had 10 children all together, and is married still, almost 60 years later. Granted it was a different era, and people had very different views about the role of women, their options in life, and acceptable marrying/child rearing age. Some say that life expectancy had a large role in determining the acceptability of 17 year olds getting married, but I don't buy that. My great grandparents, great aunts and uncles lived into their 70's 80's, and some are still alive in their 90s! It seems to me that the cultural, familial, and communal systems of the time supported the idea that people in their teens were capable of marrying, holding jobs, raising families, and taking care of their responsibilities. So what happened??? Why do we hold teenagers at such a low regard now by assuming they are too immature to handle what their own bodies are physically, sexually, and emotionally capable of doing? And if I am wrong and they are in fact too immature, has it always been that way, or are present day sociological/anthropological factors to blame?

When I talk to my grandparents or others in their generation I hear amazing stories of personal achievement, struggle, and perseverance that HAD to take place when they were teenagers because it was literally a matter of survival. My Grandmother's mom died when she was 13 which left her in the position of caretaker for her 5 siblings while her father worked. My grandmother had to quit school, raise her siblings, do all the cooking and cleaning, and take care of paying bills...AT THIRTEEN!!! And guess what, she did it. To this day she admits that it sucked (my word, certainly not hers) but she acknowledges that life often brings you those kinds of unexpected circumstances and dealing with them is what shapes the character of a person.

What shapes the character of teenagers today in positive ways? What life circumstances make them productive, caring, critically aware, and resourceful? It certainly is not the coddled, protected, helmet-wearing, suburbia bubble, internet obsessed culture I live in. It certainly is not the celebrity fame/blame, media enriched, text messaging culture of entitlement that has created a population where binge drinking, Wikipedia, and plagiarism define the college experience just as much as a diploma does.

My point? We need to stop assuming that teenagers don't have the potential to live up to the responsibilities set before them, no matter how they come to be. I believe that American culture over the last 50 years has created a generation of young people that don't really know their asses from a hole in the ground. We give teenagers so many mixed messages that it is no wonder a small group of women decide they want to have babies. At 16 a woman is too young to decide to have a baby, but at 18 a person can decide to go to war and potentially die for our country. WTF???

The main reasons for my frustration over this situation are so layered. All those who criticize the young girls who supposedly made a pact (which is rumored to only be half of the 17 who are pregnant, not ALL 17) do not address the fact that women are developing at a younger age than ever, yet are expected to hold off on acting on their own biology longer than ever. Biological development is jumping ahead of sociological development and teenagers are being unfairly judged and criticized in the process.

Is it news that babies are cute and women desire to have them, even at 17? We ask high school students all the time what they want to be when they "grow up" and we expect juniors and seniors to know what they want to major in if they go to college, or we encourage students to pick a trade to pursue, all choices that require sacrifice, hard work, life changing realities, etc. I've heard the warnings of how difficult raising children can be. Who hasn't? But the girls who entered into this so-called "pact" did so as a means of sharing the responsibility together. From what I heard the girls didn't just say let's get pregnant like some groups of friends get tattoos or beach houses together. They said lets get pregnant and raise our babies together, and that my friends, is a compelling dynamic.

I do not want to come off as if I think these girls made the best decision by getting pregnant. I do want to offer the possibility that our practices as they pertain to having children are relative to the culture in which we live, and should not be viewed in universal terms. If given the right kind of support, education, and tools throughout life, I strongly believe that a 17 year old can make a decision to be a parent, and actually be good at it. When I was 16/17 I made some of the dumbest decisions of my life BUT I also made some of the smartest. I am 32 now and even when I look back at those times I can confidently say that even though my adolescent years were complicated, I knew what I wanted for myself and I made decisions then that positively impacted me to this day.

I think American teenagers in this age have a tendency to think they know everything and are invincible because for the most part they have never suffered or made sacrifices. They have no frame of reference of their own mortality and no ability to see anything but themselves as the center of the universe. I don't believe this is a condition of being a teenager entirely. Teens in Darfur who fight daily to avoid being tortured to death are not worried about who is spreading rumors about them on Facebook. Instead they meet the daily demands of survival. The only teens who remotely understand that in our country are the ones who dodge bullets on the way to school each morning.

Teen moms cannot avoid suffering or sacrifice, and for some valid, some obsessive reasons parents today overprotect their children so they don't suffer at all. Suffering and making sacrifices is not always bad. It is an unavoidable part of life. The more we prolong the inevitable, the harder it is to actually deal with life when it happens.

What is most interesting to me throughout this debate, is that despite our assumptions of a sex-saturated culture, teen pregnancy in the U.S. has been on the steady decline from the early 90's to 2006 with slight increases in the past two years. Sex education, AIDS awareness, and abstinence programs are largely credited with the steady decrease. Some speculate that the most recent spike in pregnancy rates are a result of Abstinence only programs that fail to educate teens on the effective use of birth control and contraceptives. Others blame movies like Juno or celebs like Jamie Lynn Spears for the increase. No matter what the reason, I hardly think it should be viewed as an epidemic. Teen pregnancy is controversial because it is outside the lines of what our cultural, communal, and familial systems support.

If half the girls made a pact to have babies and share the responsibilities of raising them, I think that is a pretty innovative concept. Plus, excluding the half that did make a pact, you are left with a number of pregnant teens that is no different than the average at their school in any given year.