Teen Pregnancy Ain't Nothin' New

So you've got a bunch of teenaged girls in a small Massachusetts town who allegedly made a pact to get knocked up and people are alarmed about "babies having babies" and the "moral fabric of our society."

Yo, get a grip. These aren't the first teenage girls to get knocked up and they won't be the last. Now, word is, there was NEVER a pact at all.

In fact, why in hell is this all over every Web site and TV talk show, anyway? I've lived in neighborhoods where 16-year-old pregnant girls were the norm, not the exception.

Now, I'm not saying that's good, but I don't understand why Gloucester, Mass., is such a surprise.
According to 2006 published statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, overall teen pregnancy rates in the United States are declining. In fact, the rate was 30 percent lower in 2002 than the peak in 1991 at 61.8 births per 1000 females. Also, between 1990 and 2002 the pregnancy rate among girls who had ever had sex at all dropped 28 percent.

Among black girls, according to teenpregnancy.com, pregnancies are dropping faster than with any other group. Between 1990 and 2000, the rate dropped 40 percent. However, at 63.7 births per 1000, black girls still have significantly more teen pregnancies than the national average.

Now what does all this mean? Well first, the stats blow the hype away, so don't drink the media Kool-Aid. Teen pregnancies, although we are frustrated when we see them, have actually leveled off and declined. In the black community, they look so bad because, like in nearly all-white Gloucester, they are concentrated among the low-income side of town.

Secondly, these stats should show us something. The pregnancies all began a decline in the early 1990s as use of oral contraceptives became widely available. For many teen girls, the pill replaced their father's foot-in-your-ass form of birth control, which is largely missing as divorce rates climbed among American families.

Here's where the Religious Right (or self-righteous) always bowls me over in laughter. They are constantly babbling about how America is going down a moral toilet, but they never look up facts and figures to back up the garbage they spew. What's more, the person they look to as the principle figure in their faith was supposed to have been born to a teenage mother!

Now, as for the Gloucester 17, if you really look at it, these are not kids at all. They are really young women who made an adult decision: the choice to carry a child to term. Many girls across the nation make these choices and have options. For instance, they can choose not to have sex, thereby avoiding pregnancy completely; they can demand their partners use contraception, or use contraception themselves; they can abort the pregnancy; or they can have and raise their children.

I don't know enough about the girls in this case to make any assumptions, but if media reports are right, they chose the affirmative when it came to childbearing. So if they made such an adult decision, they should be treated as such. In a case like this, the expectation should be placed on them that they will do what is necessary to provide for themselves and their babies up to and including completing their education and obtaining marketable skills, rather than hoping to be taken care of by the public gallery because "babies are cute."

Recently, I read a fascinating book called The Case Against Adolescence, by Dr. Robert Epstein, who teaches at Harvard and is editor-at-large of Psychology Today magazine. He argues that we should eliminate the teenage years as a social phenomenon altogether. Epstein believes -- and I'm inclined to agree -- that when you are about 14 or 15, you are essentially an adult, that you are capable of making adult choices, and can operate with the competency -- and responsibility and accountability -- of any grown person.

The problem, he says, is that we tend to tell teenagers that they are feeble little kids, unable to make their own decisions and that they need to continue to suckle on their mother's social, financial and psychological teet for an increasing number of years.

The result is adolescents going to extremes to prove their maturity, and perhaps having a kid at age 16 is one way to do it. In fact, Epstein says, lots of teenage girls had kids back in the day because by that time they were married and considered old enough to start a life with their husbands of roughly the same age.

So, I say all this to say, maybe if you want to avert more Gloucester-style baby booms, how about demanding responsible mature behavior from adolescents rather than looking at them as doe-eyed cherubs. As I've said, they are essentially grown, so make them act like it, thereby at least forcing teen problems to become adult problems: their adult problems.