Redstate

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Obama's guiding principle: "I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks."

I absolutely agree that access to contraceptives would not have stopped this if it was a pact between these girls.
I think you are right to question the age of the fathers. I don't know what the age of consent would be in that state, but there could/should be consequences.

So remember, in order to stop your daughters from being impregnated from homeless child rapists, all you need to do is allow your school's nurse to give away condoms.

No need to address the problem of under 16 year old girls sleeping with homeless men in their mid 20's...(sarcasm)

The greatest risk factor for younger girls is older guys, who have perfected the art of getting into the pants of younger girls (as well as getting them to not use contraception even if they have access to it).

That is where emphasis on contraceptives is particularly misdirected (perhaps criminally so); rather, as many abstinance groups know, you have to educate and empower these younger girls to give them the tools to resist these older predator guys and to make good choices about their future and about love and valuing their bodies.

And Rightly So!

I absolutely agree with you. My husband and I lead a youth group in a small town, and we have recently had a problem with young girls taking naked pictures and texting them to a boyfriend who eventually passes them on. It blows my mind that these kids don't see anything wrong with it!

What would they possibly see wrong with it?
I passed by A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila the other day on one of those stations.
There were a group of guys and girls in the pool and, well I won't go into detail, but they were doing things I had NEVER seen before and this was 6:00 in the evening on regular old cable!
It is so sad crousehold...and we as a community are going to have to step up to the plate as a whole to combat it.
MelZ

Dated a couple hundred of years BC.

It's a rant from a guy complaining about the youth and how all they want to do is chase tail and drink alcohol and none of them want to learn how to be decent scribes or decent farmers and how society is going to hell in a handbasket.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire

Certainly it's true that people throughout the ages have written laments about the excesses of youth.

However, that has nothing to do with the issues in this thread, which dealt with 1) a gratuitous press bashing of Catholics and 2) strategies for helping teen girls make good choices that empower them for their future.

And predatory adults preying on underage girls does not fit in within the "boys will be boys" rubric.

And Rightly So!

But the fundamental problem is that, for centuries and centuries, kids were getting married. Why, my grandfather was 19 when he married my 15 year old grandmother... I suppose that that might qualify as "predatory" today.

What we consider "normal" and "healthy" doesn't really have much historical precedent.

But I ramble.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire

Teenage pregnancy has only been considered abnormal since the end of WW2. In a school of 1200, 17 girls would probably be less than 3% of the female population. That's not a very high number, and I'm not really shocked or disturbed by it. Both of my grandmothers were impregnated as teens by men a few years older than them, and it wasn't out of the ordinary. The one distinction is that my grandfathers married them; I suspect that this isn't the case with these girls. To me the problem is not sex in and of itself; the problem is careless promiscuity. Shaming these girls for being pregnant is wrong- at least they're upright enough not to go out and get abortions.

The middle class / upper middle class culture in our society has developed this tendency to infantalize the 16 - 22 year old age group. Whereas not so long ago 18 year olds were clearly considered adults- expected to go out, find work, and live on their own- we now have the expectations that parents must take care of, protect, and pay for their children at least until they're finished with college (and usually beyond- do some research into the phenomenon of "boomerang kids"). Why is this? Why should we be concerned if a 17 year old is having sex?

The weirdest thing about this article is its reference to Catholicism.

I don't know that the issue was the number of teens being pregnant, but that this group was constantly getting pregnancy tests done at the school nurse and seemed disappointed when they weren't pregnant....

... because they had decided as a group to try as hard as possible to all get pregnant so they could raise their babies together.

THAT is the disturbing trend, in my opinion anyway.

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Dependence is Slavery.

Aside from changes in the law of the land regarding age of marriage limitations, the basic difference between what went on when my granddad married grandma (like yours, she was 15) is that the requirements society places on young people now have changed.

At that time, it was expected that, except in rare cases, a boy was going into the work force as soon as he finished school (assuming he finished school) and that girls would be getting married to them and starting families (staying home to be mothers, gasp!) It wasn't unusual, in rural areas like southeastern Iowa for girls to be married before they graduated from high school because there was no emphasis placed on girls or boys necessarily finishing high school.

I don't believe that it was a good system overall, but it was the system. I'd much rather my boys finish high school, go to college and marry educated young women who have also done so.

The behavior of these young girls, and the men who impregnated them, has no place in comparison to the commonplace MARRIAGE mores of the turn of the last century.

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people."
A. Lincoln

Unfortunately, and despite the current propaganda, college isn't meant for everyone. Judging from the context provided in this story, I doubt that these girls are really interested in or cut out for post secondary education. Taken in a vacuum, the idea that some high school girls might get pregnant and not go to college isn't particularly distressing to me. (As an aside, I think that we're already shoehorning too many people into college as is. We have experienced a proliferation of diploma mills which do nothing but take money and teach people how to drink for four or more years, ultimately sending them out into the word no better prepared for life then they were when they entered college)

The disturbing aspect of this story to me is that the girls are treating child rearing as if it were a game. I'm not a fan of careless promiscuity, no matter the age of the participants. However, the article isn't narrowly focused on that aspect of the story, referring in the headline to the school's "pregnancy boom" rather than "pregnancy pact."

However, my response wasn't so much to the story in the OP as it is to the general bi-partisan kvetching over teen pregnancy. Teen pregnancy is always cast in the harshest of lights by the mainstream public- it is treated as a disaster that will inevitably ruin a girl's life. Unfortunately, a significant number of teens (including teens from good homes who have been raised well) are going to have sex, and some of those are going to get pregnant. It's no wonder that so many girls turn to abortion- they've been taught that carrying that baby to term will ruin their lives. The OP has those undertones.

As an abortion opponent, I believe that we have to soften the apocalyptic tone that we use when discussing teen pregnancy. (The article cited in the OP underscores my point- it denigrates the Spears girl for having a baby and serving as a role model for other teen pregnancies. Would they rather have had her abort the baby and provide that example?) My initial response was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction triggered by my underlying beliefs on the teen pregnancy issue.

The "pact" part (if true) is disturbing. The idea that 2% of the girls in a high school are pregnant is not.

I did not intend to denigrate these girls being pregnant. I know plenty of young mothers, in fact, my mother was young when she had me. I also understand that not everyone is cut out for college. Neither of my siblings have attended, but both are happy, productive members of society.
Teen pregnancy does bother me because it is contrary to my own moral belief system, but what disturbs me most is that these girls feel that their lives are so empty and meaningless that the only way they think they can be happy is to have a baby at a young age. One was impregnated by a homeless man for heaven's sake! This is wrong! These girls should have been loved and taught that they deserve better than to raise a child alone because their friends thought it would be a good idea.

schools and the pc police that makes sure no one gets offended by mentions of God.

hmmm

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
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