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Cause and effect

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I tend to agree with this op-ed in the Post today about normalizing teen pregnancy through shows like 16 and Pregnant. We shouldn’t make teen pregnancy look easy because it’s not. Neither are teen abortions.

As a result, we shouldn’t also make teen sex look so easy. But the author won’t touch that issue:

Positive reviewers have called the show “educational ” and “sweet and touching.” But those words say more about the people using them — for they suggest an increasingly casual attitude toward the underlying subject matter. Maybe when contraceptive use drops among young females, and 16-year-old girls begin dropping out of school to start families, the wisdom of such attitudes will be revisited.

If we are going to say teens will be teens–they are going to have sex anyway, then I’d advocate for teaching them about marriage, making their already very serious sexual committments permanent, and worrying less as a society about whether our kids have advanced degrees.

I know the abortion clinics are filled with girls who never envisioned getting pregnant with the guy she was having sex with, and now she feels she must have an abortion to escape his memory. If that is the case–why on earth are we treating sex so lightly? A girl who doesn’t actually like a guy should not be having sex with him.

And if these are little Romeos and Juliets–well then, get married and have kids. Enough already with engaging in adult behaviours while studiously avoiding–or glorifying–the sometimes difficult adult outcomes.

In other news, water is wet and bacon is bad for you

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A study from the usually serious RAND concludes that slick and successful TV programming that portrays teen sex as cool, fun and consequence free can influence teenagers’ decisions about sex.

In findings that covered 718 teenagers, there were 91 pregnancies. The top 10th of adolescents who watched the most sexy programming were at double the risk of becoming pregnant or causing a pregnancy compared to the 10th who watched the fewest such programs, according to the study published in the journal Pediatrics.

Is anybody really surprised that media consumption influences behaviour? The multi-billion dollar advertising industry is built entirely on the link between what people read, watch and listen to, and what they buy, do and think. Government restrictions on broadcasting content aren’t the solution (although watch for someone to advocate just that). Parents and pressure groups have been fairly successful in getting graphic violence out of prime time TV. This is laudable.  But why not pay the same attention to other causes of suffering and social breakdown? Far more innocents are harmed when kids are taught that it’s fine for them to have sex than are harmed by gun violence, for instance.

On a more encouraging note, buried in the second half of the story is this tidbit: “Living in a two-parent family reduced the chances of a teen getting pregnant or causing a pregnancy.” Again, this won’t be news to most of us, but it bears repeating. And it’s good that pediatricians are getting involved – perhaps if we can frame teen sex, pregnancy and STDs as a matter of health, rather than a matter of sexual freedom, we can begin to mitigate some of the suffering that is so well documented by Maggie Gallagher, Kay Hymowitz, Theodore Dalrymple, and the other invaluable writers who have been telling the stories of teenagers set adrift.

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Tanya balks: Bacon is BAD FOR YOU???

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Véronique adds: What about a bacon chocolate bar? Two negatives HAVE to make a positive, right?

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Andrea is concerned about bacon and chocolate, together, advertised as follows:

Breathe…engage your five senses, close your eyes and inhale deeply. Be in the present moment, notice the color of the chocolate, the glossy shine. Rub your thumb over the chocolate bar to release the aromas of smoked applewood bacon flirting with deep milk chocolate. Snap off just a tiny piece and place it in your mouth, let the lust of salt and sweet coat your tongue.

They conclude rather more pragmatically with the words “Consume within eight weeks.”

Are you comfortable with this? Really?

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The article in the Globe is called Under 18, and pregnant by design.

For many people, the narrative of teenage pregnancy seems fairly set: A young girl has sex, misses her period, takes a surreptitious pregnancy test and receives the shocking news.

She then must decide whether to kill the child or carry the child to term, both options often devastating to deal with. But there is another scenario that is alive and well, despite decades of access to sex education and contraception: Some teenage girls welcome the news.

Ok. Of course you know that’s not what the article says. It actually reads as follows:

She then must decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or carry the child to term…

But we all know what that means. Are you comfortable with this? Move beyond the “but she is in a tough spot, and she can’t afford it, and she’s really scared…” She had sex. She got pregnant. There’s no undo button. What are we as a society going to confirm as valid choices?

That’s crazy

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What? Girls like babies? Kay Hymowitz makes the valid point that unless we address this small biological imperative, birth control pills ain’t gonna help, because girls won’t take them with the religious attention required for them to be effective. A girl who can find a homeless man to be the father of her child could certainly have found the Planned Parenthood clinic, no matter how far away.

Put another way, ubersocialized middle-class experts, journalists and policymakers aren’t addressing the fact that girls tend to like babies. In most cultures in human history, 15-or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need. But in more complex societies like ours, in which a long period of education and wealth accumulation is necessary to prepare for an advanced labour market and marriage, adolescent baby lust poses a big problem.

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Tanya just clicked: That’s what’s been bothering me about this story form the outset, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. Teaching a girl how to put on a condom or take a pill won’t do much if she’s bent on getting pregnant. It’s not just a ‘teenage girl’ thing. 

 

Here’s where a good ole’ dose of abstinence education comes in handy. ‘How does that make any sort of sense?’ you say. Well, abstinence education is ideally coupled with ideas like self-worth, family values and the importance of one partner for life. Nothing wrong with having a baby, even as a teenager. Just get married to the best man in the world first.

 

I liked Juno too

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But this is ridiculous:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.

I’ve heard about this before; girls so desperate for real love they are ready to do just about anything, including jeopardizing their future by having a child WAY too early. Yes, I said jeopardizing.

Look: I’m pro-life (or at least, anti-abortion), which means I prefer women and girls keep their babies even if it means giving them up for adoption. It’s not the babies’ fault their moms goofed, and once they’re conceived and growing, they’re human and as such they deserve a chance. But I would NEVER go so far as suggest a woman or a girl have a baby before she’s ready for that kind of commitment. That’s just crazy.

And here as in so many other cases, I blame the parents. What a wretched job some of them do – come on, people, can’t you see your children are crying for love and attention? Are you too wrapped up in your own selfish concerns to notice?

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Tanya adds: One thing that left me torn here was how the high school was handling the rising teen pregnancy rate.

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.”

I’m all for these programs, and yet maybe not. Not to the degree where it would encourage young girls to get pregnant, facing single motherhood, and while still in high school no less.

The flip side of this scenario is kicking girls out of high school if they are pregnant. That’s how poorly they handled it in my day, not so long ago.

Some balance in this area would be essential. Maybe we could start at the University level, since very little is done to accommodate motherhood on Canadian campuses. There’s a great pro-active project for all the campus pro-life groups out there.

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Rebecca adds: I share your reservations, Tanya. On the one hand, kicking pregnant girls out of school, or otherwise making it less likely that they’ll finish high school and move on, hardly serves their children, who are already a reality by the time schools find out teens are pregnant. On the other, lessening a taboo lowers the social cost of an act, and the lower the cost, the more people engage in it.

How about a separate school for teenage mothers (and fathers, for that matter, if they are still school age and involved with raising their children)? Such a school could provide daycare on site, to help get young mothers to finish high school (and keep nursing if they do, which is pretty much impossible if the children spend the workweek far from their mothers), and could also provide some guidance about parenting, infant nutrition, and so on. But it would differentiate these young mothers from their classmates, which isn’t entirely a bad thing: like it or not, by becoming mothers, they have left a portion of their childhood behind, and it serves nobody to pretend this isn’t so. And it would perhaps lead fewer of their peers to think that teen motherhood is easy or desireable.

“I didn’t know”

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Ok, so one blogger links to another and so it goes. Blaise drew my attention to Feministing, who both in turn drew my attention to Pam Stenzel.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ezYNWIDB0]

Now Feministing can say she’s lying and dangerous as much as she wants–but young girls are going to like her. Why? Because she can relate to them. A while ago, I admitted that as a teen or even university student, I’d have rather been dead than pregnant. First time now, I’m hearing an experienced counsellor say she sees this mentality all the time. But she doesn’t go on to say what I might: That it’s not the end of the world to be pregnant, let’s gain some long term perspective and help each other out… She says for a girl that age, unmarried, not done school, the options once pregnant are bad, worse and terrible. What she’s doing is conveying the notion that there is no “undo” button, something our friends at the condom companies understand, but our feminist friends do not. 

Pam Stenzel will do well because she’s telling the truth. And Feministing can’t change that, even if she doesn’t like it.   

P.S. Stenzel is bang on about the cause of poverty in America–and Canada–today.

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Tanya adds: This is absolutely a video every woman (mother or not) should watch the whole hour through. (YouTube provides it in 10 minute segments.)

Please tell me this isn’t happening

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Don’t get me wrong: As a rule I’d rather pregnant teens kept their babies instead of going for abortions. But really, I’d much rather teens didn’t have to deal with such issues through the good old-fashioned trick of not getting pregnant in the first place. I didn’t use to think that made me a weirdo. Now I wonder…

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Andrea adds: I am flat out encouraged by what I’ll call the Juno phenomenon: Teens who understand what abortion is and refuse to go through with it. All these commentaries decrying the lack of abortion representation in Hollywood these days–I’ll have none of it. A pregnant teen is a problem. An abortion is a bigger problem. So is this idea that you can have sex and never get pregnant–that women can always prevent pregnancy. I’m going to go out on a limb and say something really controversial: Sex and pregnancy are linked. So long as all of us–teens, young women, young men–are encouraged to believe they can be separated, we’ll see teen pregnancies, and indeed pregnancies everywhere. I reject the notion that women can always prevent pregnancy, that there is a foolproof way to do so. We all know someone who was cautious, very cautious, and then got pregnant.

Sex education these days is a mess: who got the “Intimacy Pyramid” in grade nine phys ed? Ah yes, one is supposed to check off the level of intimacy one is comfortable with. At the bottom, holding hands and kissing. At the top–you know what (sex)– the idea being you could call it quits at any point in between. And that one step was unrelated from the other. I’m sorry, but it don’t work that way, especially not in high school.

Anyway–teens are the least likely to use contraception properly, and the least likely to be able to express at any point with a boyfriend or girlfriend: “Excuse me, but we are currently hitting a point in the intimacy pyramid that I’m uncomfortable with.”

We need to change channels on sex ed. But nonetheless, I’m glad we are seeing teens reject abortion. So they should. Nothing worse than hitting your 30s, finding you’ve spent your whole life preventing pregnancy, only to find now you want to get pregnant and can’t. That must be agonizing for those women who were encouraged to have an abortion.

So Brigitte–while I think I get what you are saying, I say this instead. Do tell me this is happening. Not the normalization or full out acceptance of teen pregnancy as a normal phenomenon, but the rejection of abortion as a fix-all.  

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Brigitte, er, clarifies: The headline on that Maclean’s cover story to which I linked is, “Suddenly teen pregancy is cool?” To which my answer is: Golly, I sure hope not!! Otherwise I agree with Andrea. But at the risk of exposing myself as a terminally old-fashioned and uncool person, I like to think 13- to 17-year-olds are better off studying, getting a job, playing sports and preparing themselves for a fulfilling life as a smart, educated woman, than they are testing the efficacy of various birth-control methods.

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Andrea adds another two cents: Brigitte–terminally uncool is the woman who suggests babies have something to do with sex. I think you are doing okay- downright hip! With your clarification then we can agree: Teens are better off not having sex. But that’s where sex ed needs to change channels. Because (say it all together in singsong) “if they’re going to do it anyway,” they might as well have the “intimacy pyramid…” Right.

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