August 24, 2005
Mysterious Force Causes Teen Pregnancies
An
Akron/Canton-area TV station recently reported that, at Canton’s Timken
High School, which has 489 female students, 65 are currently pregnant.
School officials, the report informs us, “are not sure what has
contributed to so many pregnancies.”
I think
we can eliminate carburetors and capital gains taxes as suspects.
Welcome
to Sexual Revolution: Generation Four. Forty-some years ago, a bunch of
radicals thought it would be great for society (or maybe just for them)
if everyone could pretty much have sex with whomever they wanted,
whenever they wanted - at whatever age. Regardless of marital status.
One
wonders if those who are still alive can look to Canton and be proud of
what they've achieved.
The
Canton Health Department says that 104 of 586 local babies born through
July of this year had mothers between 11 (yes, 11) and 19. Clearly, the
vast majority of these babies will born into situations where:
- -
The parents are not married to each other and are not both living
with the baby.
- -
The parents have not finished high school, if they’ve even started
it.
- -
The parents are not financially independent.
- -
The parents either will never be married to each other, or, if they
do go through a shotgun wedding, are unlikely to still be together
when the baby is old enough to become a parent. (Say, nine?)
Many
will surely respond to news like this with the usual prescription for
easier access to birth control. But that's how we got here in the first
place. No one factor was more instrumental in setting off the sexual
revolution than the invention of the birth control pill.
With
the pill, sex could be risk-free, if not guilt-free - or so it was
thought. But even the pill doesn't help you if you don't use it
responsibly, and as society started believing sex had become risk-free,
those engaging in sex became younger and younger - and by definition,
less responsible.
Sex is
the problem, specifically sex between the wrong people, at the wrong
age, at the wrong station in life. And birth control, far from being the
answer, is part of the problem because it fools the young into thinking
sex has no consequences.
They're
kids. They don't remember to wash their hands half the time. What makes
you think they can remember to take their pills or unwrap their condoms?
(Especially when they've been drinking, which is a whole other column.)
And
their babies are likely to follow their lead.
Most of
these children are going to grow up with no frame of reference for how
stable families are established. To them, it will be normal that mom and
dad have never been married to each other, and that they will be taxied
back and forth between two parents (unless, of course, one of the
parents is not involved in their lives at all, in which case that
will seem normal). Some of these kids will be approaching 10 years old
before their mothers are even old enough to get married or get a
job.
By that
time, she may have seven or eight more boyfriends. She may move in with
one of them. Or all of them. The boyfriends may have their own kids, who
are dealing with the same things – trying to figure out how to define
mom and dad when all previous rules for doing so have been tossed aside.
As
Generation Four of the Sexual Revolution enters the world, personified
by the Timken Baby Boomers of ’05, understand that they will have never
known a world any different from this, and neither have their parents.
So how
do we put this genie back in the bottle? I would suggest we teach kids
to abstain from sex until marriage and explain that relying on birth
control is like playing Russian Roulette.
But I
hear that teaching abstinence "doesn't work." So, lacking any other
ideas, I'll just start thinking about what to say around 2014, because
that's when fourth grade starts for the Timken High babies of '05, and
with it, Generation Five.
© 2005
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
