This article, and the comments in response, make me want to throw something. The (white, male) author bemoans the frequency of teen pregnancy amongst the low-income, mostly non-white girls he teaches. He writes:
It happens too often. A female student approaches my desk, says “Mr. Okun?”, and and whispers the two words no adult wants to hear from a teenager: “I’m pregnant.” I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to shake her with anger. What have you done? Life is not hard enough already? Is it over, have you given up? What about finishing high school? What about college? What about your own dreams? What about enjoying the last of your own childhood? How can you parent a child when you are just a child yourself? How will you support your baby, how will you support yourself? Where is the man, will he be here next year? Will I see you and your baby coldly waiting alone for a city bus that will not come? Please look me in the eye and tell me you know what you have done.
Yes, those dumb low-income teenagers have never, ever considered the consequences of getting pregnant, and they desperately need a white dude to berate them. And it gets worse, from the very first comment:
This happens to black girl teenagers everywhere and abortion is not used often enough… [insert story of author’s own abortion] … Join me in funding abortions for black teenagers.
Other commenters discuss how they don’t “believe” in abortion, which is funny since they follow up by railing against it. Most of them emphasize that adoption is the best option.
Now, I’m all about access and funding for all reproductive choices, including abortion, contraception, pre-natal care, adoption, and well-baby services. But I think we’ve done enough to coerce women of color into compromising their reproductive rights, while encouraging middle- and upper-class white women to “out-breed” them by having as many babies as possible.
Contraception, abortion, adoption and sexual health education are all important. But we need to look at why we think young women shouldn’t be having babies, and make sure that those reasons are accessible in every community. The “if you have a baby you don’t be able to go to college” argument doesn’t hold much water if the pregnant girl was never considering college in the first place. For a lot of low-income young women, getting pregnant and having a baby is a perfectly rational decision: It secures her health care, independence, and social status. If her life plans include working at a low-skilled low-wage job and having children, it makes sense to have those children early. When young women lack options, there are few negative costs to giving birth early.
How we deal with the “problem” of teen pregnancy largely depends on how we view and frame the issue in the first place. If what we’re bothered by is young, low-income women of color having babies and becoming social drains,* then it makes sense to promote abstinence, contraception and abortion; cut off welfare funding; poo-poo teen pregnancy; and generally ignore the problem. If what we’re bothered by are the lack of options facing young, low-income women — and particularly low-income women of color — and we recognize that early pregnancy is often a logical consequence of those limited options, and that the negative “consequences” of pregnancy can be mitigated, then it makes more sense to take a holistic view of social and reproductive justice.
Commentators often link teen pregnancy with a variety of social ills — poverty, high-school drop-out rates, crime, and on and on. But tying all of these problems to teen pregnancy and single-mother families seems short-sighted. There’s no question that it’s difficult to be a pregnant girl or a single parent and still be able to finish school or hold down a full-time job. But a correlation between early pregnancy and poverty does not mean that early pregnancy causes poverty. We should be concerned for women and girls in their own right, and we should fight poverty because we don’t want people to be impoverished — not because poverty is only bad for babies. We should fight the cycle of poverty by attacking the myriad and interconnected root causes, by promoting social justice for all people, and by strengthening our social safety net, not by blaming the victim and attacking the most vulnerable groups.
We can decrease the early pregnancy rate by giving young women options beyond what they have right now, by embracing a holistic vision of physical and spiritual health, and by giving them the tools to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We can mitigate the negative effects of pregnancy by making sure that every woman, regardless of her physical condition or her parental status, has full access to health care, to education, to employment, and to the resources she needs to provide for herself and her family. And we can quit lecturing and shaming young women as if finger-wagging will do anything at all to improve their situation — you know, the one we supposedly care so very much about.
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*Obviously not my view nor my terminology