Strollerderby : teen moms

Sarah Palin: Family Has to Pull Together for Pregnant Teens

JeanneSager — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:34:00 GMT

In what was supposed to be Bristol Palin's big moment with mom's buddy Greta on Fox News, but I doubt anyone was suprised when Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin stuck her head - and her two cents - into the conversation.

But while her daughter's common sense approach to abstinence-only education (it doesn't work - duuuuh) has been getting all the attention, the former vice presidential candidate was surprisingly on the ball. When things go wrong, she says, families have to come together.

In fact there are five generations coming together in the Palin clan - Bristol, her mom, her grandmother and even her great-grandmother make four, plus baby Tripp. Admittedly (and this isn't a knock on the Palins), it's a lot easier to pull together that kind of crew for a teen mom - they're the few moms young enough to still maybe have a great-grandmother around. But as VanSusteren points out, there's "joy" in the Palin family when they look at the product of a teen pregnancy. Most families don't have that. If anything, a teen pregnancy has the affect of driving families apart as the various generations point fingers and play the blame game.

It can be argued that's how teens fall into the teen pregnancy trap, but not always. Look at the Palins. For all that's wrong with them (do I really need to go there?), they are neither destitute (stereotype number one), lacking in family values (stereotype number two) or, well, a minority (stereotype number three). Any kid can end up a parent at seventeen, whether their parents support them or not.

Once it happens, the only way to wrest a victory for all three kids involved is to throw the weight of the family behind them. Whether that means supporting a teen's abortion, their choice to give up the child for adoption or their choice to keep it. What's happened has happened, and a family turning their back on the kids in their time of need is the absolute worst thing that can happen - for everyone involved.

Teen pregnancy sucks. There is no way around it. But when a kid is in trouble, it's up to their parents to step in and pull them up by those boot straps. It's called parenting, people.

As Palin points out, "It's not the most ideal situation, but certainly you make the most of it."

Kind of like a liberal agreeing with something Sarah Palin says, huh?

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Study: Virginity Pledges Fail Big Time. Bristol Palin Declines to Comment

Cole Gamble — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

According to the research, 1 out of 8 teens will take a vow of virginity until marriage. Did you think the stat was that high? That’s means 1 of every 8 couples in America is having some very awkward, highly uninformed and unprepared post-marital sex. But virginity pledges aren’t about enjoying sex (‘cause that would be super sinful to enjoy your body). Instead, these pledges are meant to save youngsters from the dangers of sex with the fool proof abstinence method.

But guess what? It doesn’t work. At all. What’s more, virginity pledge takers are more likely to engage in dangerous sexual activity such as not wearing a condom.

You know abstinence is also the main line of strategy our outgoing administration has used to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Upon hearing that they could just stop having sex, all of the genocidal rapists primarily responsible for the epidemic must have slapped their collective heads and said, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

If you could tell by the tone of this blog, I see no point in virginity pledges and in fact find them dangerous. That’s is not to say I want my kids doing when they’re 13 and I certainly not going to encourage them to do it sooner than later. It’s just that it’s completely biological normal to want to have sex as a teen. When you stand in the way of biology you tend to get burned.

But maybe I’m way off. Do you think virginity pledges are a good thing? Maybe you didn’t believe in them when you were young and single, but now that you have kids of your own you’ve flipped your position. How wrong am I?

More by this author:

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8-Year-Old Too Young to Divorce?

The 33 Most Ridiculous Toys Ever

Pete Wentz: "I've Tasted Ashley's Breast Milk."

Teacher Beats Student to Death for Late Homework

A Guy’s Take on Stay at Home Moms and Dads (Part 1: The Cons)

Banana Dildos and the 10 Worst Toys and Gifts This Christmas (part 1)

Desert Island Disks – Kid Music Edition

Preventing Teen Pregnancy, One Tick at a Time

JeanneSager — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:34:00 GMT

Comedienne Wanda Sykes just joined the list of celebrities who probably won’t get a Christmas card from Sarah Palin this year. Not that the wisecracking liberal was likely to be on the list anyway – have you seen the gay marriage bit?

But Wanda was at large last week in Atlanta with a number of other celebrities working to have their names removed from the Palin family newsletter list (I hear there’s a whole section on how to name a baby). So what did Martina Navratilova, Lily Tomlin, Big Boi and Sally Field all do that's against the Palin motto?

They designed timepieces for this year's IKEA It's About Time charity auction, with all the money going to fight teen pregnancy. OK, so I cooked this up a little bit - Sarah Palin wasn't actually there. With that kind of write-up, did you think she would be?

The auction was, however, timed just as teen pregnancy has been thrust back into the spotlight, first with the announcement that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. It's been kept there by the media's (yeah, we suck, don't we?) repeated reference to the Alaskan governor's decision to use her line item veto to slash funding that would have helped keep teen moms in her state off of the streets. Then there was the announcement that the number of teen moms is on the rise for the first time in 15 years.

Which is why Jane Fonda's pet project, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP) could really use a little help from her friends at IKEA and in the biz last week. The program's Second Chance Homes section does exactly what Palin was against in Alaska - provides homes for homeless teenage moms so they can complete their education and learn parenting/life skills in a stable environment.

Their success results are staggering - less than 1 percent of the teen moms who go through Second Chance end up pregnant again. All of them attend school, with a number going on to secondary education. All of their children receive immunizations on time (which means they're also seeing a pediatrician on a regular basis).

And each has shown a decreased dependency on state programs - including WIC and food stamps. You know, a savings for the state - the type of thing a governor might want to see.

Image: Pennsylvania Public Health

Tyra Banks Talks to Wanna-be Teen Moms

Are Shotgun Weddings the Best Answer to Teen Pregnancy?

Tyra Banks Talks to Wanna-be Teen Moms

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Guests on last night’s Tyra Banks Show included a pregnant 13-year-old who used to want to be a lawyer, but who now says, without a tone of regret, that she doesn’t think she’ll make it to college. A 14-year-old who is actively trying to get pregnant said that she believes that her boyfriend would “probably marry” her if she got pregnant—unless he decides he doesn’t want to be with her anymore “for some reason.” Perhaps that reason could be going to college instead of continuing to mow lawns to support his family? This teenager also said that she wants a baby because she thinks baby showers are just so “fun and adorable!” Tyra wisely reminded her that a baby shower lasts for two hours.

I’d like to pass the topic of this show off as one of those sensational trends that gets a lot of media coverage but doesn’t necessarily reflect real life. But the fact is, one in three teenage girls will become pregnant before she turns 20—that’s the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world. And teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. are on the rise for the first time in 15 years.

It’s clear from listening to these girls talk that they are lacking something fundamental—a sense of control over their lives or the experience of unconditional love, to put it broadly. Adolescence is such a difficult time of life and the thought that one could have a tiny, adorable being to devote one’s self to—rather than having to work to forge a life for one’s self—could be appealing to some youth. But, naturally, this fantasy is nothing like the reality of being a teen mom.

Young men and women need not only comprehensive sex education, but parenting and marriage education that explains that these are not states into which one enters lightly. And almost all of the media hubbub over teen pregnancy has focused on girls. What about the boys who are getting these girls pregnant? They need to understand the consequences of their actions just as much as girls do, including the risk that having sex at such a young age will make their partners long for, and perhaps seek, more commitment than they can handle.

Thanks to Jezebel, you can watch a clip of the last night’s show here.

Photo: informedvoters.wordpress.com

Are Shotgun Weddings the Best Answer to Teen Pregnancy?

Now They Say No: Teens Deny 'Pregnancy Pact'

Amy Kuras — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:03:00 GMT

Apparently, you folks are interested in the "pregnancy pact" story based on the amout of discussion it’s generated here. It's based on a report in Time Magazine that 17 girls from a Gloucester, Mass. High school decided to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

My last post on the matter drew huge comments, and I've seen other headlines about the story everywhere (including at the grocery store today, on a supermarket tabloid "We wanted to be like Jamie Lynn"—Pregnancy Pact Girls. Sure.)

And now some of the girls who got pregnant this school year are coming forward and saying there was no pact, that it was just chance.

I think something is rotten here, although I'm not sure what. The school generally sees 3 or 4 pregnancies a year, not 17, so something was up. However, the teacher who spoke to Time about the story has since refused to comment publicly.

And the larger question, of course, is why so many girls got pregnant, pact or no. Lack of access to birth control and information about sex ed and pregnancy prevention is one reason. The town is also dependent on the fishing industry –life there is pretty hardscrabble, it seems, and these girls had little sense of hope for their future. And many of them came from teen parents themselves.

Equally as important as why these girls got pregnant is why they so much as glancing at, much less having sex with, winners like one girl's babydaddy, who was quoted in the Guardian with this trenchant observation as to how the spike in pregnancies happened:

"They were horny, it was a cold winter. It's boring around this town. Nothing to do."

Oy.

Teens Make Pregnancy Pact -- Wha???

Amy Kuras — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:33:00 GMT

I know teen girls are not always the most rational of people, but, WTF?

Apparently a group of 17 girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts decided they would make a pregnancy pact with each other. A pregnancy pact. Not, you might think, a "let's not get pregnant and graduate and maybe even go to college" pact, no, this pact was to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

None of these girls were older than 16.

According to one of the school officials, they noticed something was amiss when there was a huge spike in girls coming in to the nurses' office for pregnancy tests. Many came in multiple times and several seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were.

One of the fathers is allegedly a 24-year-old homeless man.

This brain trust was looking for unconditional love, said community members and classmates (none of them would be interviewed for the Time story). Because little babies are such givers, really, always concerned with what their mom needs and wants, happy to sleep a little more or stop crying already because it's all about YOUR needs. Right?

Oh, but there is more than enough stupid to go around here. Community members got up in arms, not over what these girls did, but over the school nurse and principal suggesting that providing birth control without parental consent might help stem this tide. Both ended up quitting in protest.

Better yet? Some blame Juno. Yeaaahhh.