Ok, so I'm reading this Time.com piece about the high school students in Gloucester, Mass., who hit the news last week because they supposedly made a "pact" to get pregnant and have babies in high school. (Of course, that blood-oath thing turned out to be not quite true...but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?)
The Time article is a nice examination of how the story was interpreted by anyone with an agenda - abstinence-only sex-ed folks, sane access to birth control folks, etc. In the rush to turn this into a message of some kind, the real issues - HELLO! Seventeen teen-aged mothers!!! And their almost certainly doomed-to-poverty kids! - got steamrolled. I particularly love the part where one of the young women told Good Morning America that she's mystified as to why the screaming heads think movies like "Juno" are to blame.
Then we get to this chestnut of BS - after an analysis of trends in teen pregnancy rates, Time concludes that girls aren't having sex or getting pregnant in greater numbers than they ever were, just that more of them are keeping their babies. "Surely they deserve more sympathy and support than shame and derision [yes, good], if the trend they reflect is not a typical teenager's inclination to have sex [a bit shaky - do you have some sort of data to back that up?] but rather a willingness to take responsibility for the consequences."
LOUD NOISES!!! Oooooh, that pisses me off. So, a 16- or 17-year-old who gets pregnant, has the baby, keeps the baby, permanently f*cks her life, her kid's life and the baby-daddy's life, not to mention the extra load on her 50-something-year-old parents, deserves a gold star? But the girl who makes a different decision is an evil lazy slacker? We saw this same crap back when Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy - this condescending pat-on-the-head for a young, inexperienced person under immense pressure, simply because she made a decision that happens to jibe with that of the patriarchy.
Let's get a few things straight - children are a gift, but they can be an incredible burden to someone who isn't prepared financially or emotionally. The decision to carry through an unplanned pregnancy is a deeply personal one, and not easily made no matter what a woman's age. No one needs the added burden of feeling like she'll disappoint people if she doesn't make the "right" choice. There's more than one way to be responsible. For one woman, giving her baby up for adoption could be the responsible choice. For another, terminating the pregnancy early on could be the responsible choice, as heartbreaking as that choice would be. Pretty much any course of action that doesn't end with the baby left in a Dumpster is responsible.
Time's right when they state that these young people deserve support, not shaming. To that I wish they'd added, "and they also don't deserve judgment - ours or anyone else's."
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