thepaulo
06-22-2008, 03:52 AM
this is what these crazy kids do today....
Forget Debate Club, or possibly Girl Scouts or even student government, apparently a group of sophomore girls in Gloucester, Mass., decided to get pregnant for the fun of it. These are girls with too much free time, or families who taught them all the wrong things. We believe the latter.
The 17 girls, according to an Associate Press story, frequented the school health clinic. They took pregnancy tests and passed out high-fives when they came back positive. They appeared gloomy when the tests were negative.
No fathers have been identified, but it's believed that one girl became pregnant by a 24-year-old homeless man. But it's all smiles from the girls with the buns in the oven. How sad.
Right here in Highlands County and in nearby Hardee County, a lot of good people constantly work to keep teen pregnancy in check. They've lowered the number of teen girls who get pregnant locally by impressive numbers, but historically our area has had a high teen birth rate. That's often the case in lower income rural areas.
In Gloucester, a hard-scrabble fishing town, the girls joining the "Birthing Club" were from low income homes where birth control often isn't allowed and teen mothers are common. It's difficult to believe that in today's world parents would approve — or at least not disapprove — of their teen daughter getting pregnant. Obviously that's not the case in some places.
When all a girl or boy has ever seen are single teen moms with babies on their hips — or their grandparents' hips — it's understandable what kind of message that sends. Just the same, there are so many warnings, so many programs, so many learning opportunities that everyone knows it's a big mistake.
The responsibility is the parents' and the teens'. Society can't dictate cultural norms, unless they are unlawful. Until parents teach their children right and wrong about these things, it never will change.
Of course some teens will become pregnant accidentally. It's a fact of life and all the abstinence programs in the world won't change that. But there's not an excuse for this kind of outrageous behavior, where the goal is to get pregnant.
It's sad when a teen can only find her identity or place in society by getting pregnant. It's sad when a young life with great potential is possibly sidetracked because a pregnancy got in the way. Sure, some people overcome it, but the odds are stacked against them.
Statistics show that children raised by teenagers are much more likely to end up growing up poor, dropping out of school, ending up with law enforcement issues and becoming teen parents themselves. They often struggle economically throughout their lives because opportunities are lost to them and their parents.
There always are examples that contradict those statistics, and people who are teen parents often hold up those cases as why teen pregnancy is acceptable. That's false reasoning, of course, because although there are exceptions, the vast majority of teens having babies have major problems physically and psychologically.
Let's hope that in Gloucester and across the country the example set by these young teens is not imitated.
Forget Debate Club, or possibly Girl Scouts or even student government, apparently a group of sophomore girls in Gloucester, Mass., decided to get pregnant for the fun of it. These are girls with too much free time, or families who taught them all the wrong things. We believe the latter.
The 17 girls, according to an Associate Press story, frequented the school health clinic. They took pregnancy tests and passed out high-fives when they came back positive. They appeared gloomy when the tests were negative.
No fathers have been identified, but it's believed that one girl became pregnant by a 24-year-old homeless man. But it's all smiles from the girls with the buns in the oven. How sad.
Right here in Highlands County and in nearby Hardee County, a lot of good people constantly work to keep teen pregnancy in check. They've lowered the number of teen girls who get pregnant locally by impressive numbers, but historically our area has had a high teen birth rate. That's often the case in lower income rural areas.
In Gloucester, a hard-scrabble fishing town, the girls joining the "Birthing Club" were from low income homes where birth control often isn't allowed and teen mothers are common. It's difficult to believe that in today's world parents would approve — or at least not disapprove — of their teen daughter getting pregnant. Obviously that's not the case in some places.
When all a girl or boy has ever seen are single teen moms with babies on their hips — or their grandparents' hips — it's understandable what kind of message that sends. Just the same, there are so many warnings, so many programs, so many learning opportunities that everyone knows it's a big mistake.
The responsibility is the parents' and the teens'. Society can't dictate cultural norms, unless they are unlawful. Until parents teach their children right and wrong about these things, it never will change.
Of course some teens will become pregnant accidentally. It's a fact of life and all the abstinence programs in the world won't change that. But there's not an excuse for this kind of outrageous behavior, where the goal is to get pregnant.
It's sad when a teen can only find her identity or place in society by getting pregnant. It's sad when a young life with great potential is possibly sidetracked because a pregnancy got in the way. Sure, some people overcome it, but the odds are stacked against them.
Statistics show that children raised by teenagers are much more likely to end up growing up poor, dropping out of school, ending up with law enforcement issues and becoming teen parents themselves. They often struggle economically throughout their lives because opportunities are lost to them and their parents.
There always are examples that contradict those statistics, and people who are teen parents often hold up those cases as why teen pregnancy is acceptable. That's false reasoning, of course, because although there are exceptions, the vast majority of teens having babies have major problems physically and psychologically.
Let's hope that in Gloucester and across the country the example set by these young teens is not imitated.