Wordful Wednesday: Preventing Teen Pregnancy

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

I doubt that any par­ent of a teenager was sur­prised when new mother Bris­tol Palin, daugh­ter of the Alaskan Gov­er­nor, opined that teen absti­nence is a wor­thy goal, but, as a form of birth con­trol, “not real­is­tic at all.”

This photo of our best friends’ old­est daugh­ter really shocked me:

She is not a teenager. In fact, she is 21 years old — just three weeks younger than our #1Son — and a senior in col­lege. But many young adults are far from ready to take on the respon­si­bil­ity of par­ent­hood in their early 20’s.

For­tu­nately, there were two pho­tos attached to the email I received from her mother.

Per­haps, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing instruc­tion on birth con­trol meth­ods includ­ing, but not lim­ited to absti­nence, high schools should con­sider invest­ing in an “empa­thy belly” to give stu­dents an oppor­tu­nity to wear it around campus.

Which is what our young friend has been doing in con­junc­tion with her mater­nity rota­tion. She is com­plet­ing her Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence degree — in nurs­ing.


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{ 6 comments }

1 PinkLady Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 11:31 pm

Hi Janie, teen preg­nancy is one of our worst night­mares for our own kids. These teens think it’s all house play and they have “Mom” to take care of the baby. What they don’t real­ize is that their lives are never going to be the same again. Love and romance fly out of the win­dow as soon as the baby starts to cry.

I hope you can drop by again at my site. I have some­thing there wait­ing for you.

Bing (“,)

PinkLady´s most recent post: Giv­ing Back The Love

2 Marianne Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 8:59 pm

I was watch­ing a local news story and they were talk­ing to teenage moth­ers about why they wanted to get preg­nant. The vast major­ity of them wanted some­thing to love. This is so sad because they have no clue what they are in for.
Back in the olden days of the 1970’s when I was in high school a good friend of mine got preg­nant. She thought she could han­dle it and ended up mar­ry­ing her boy friend. Before I moved to Los Ange­les, I went to see her. She was mis­er­able. She told me she didn’t think it was going to be so hard to care for a baby. She felt she gave up every­thing she wanted to do with her life. The sad part is she got divorced after hav­ing two more kids.
There is some­thing miss­ing in their lives that make them want to make this very adult choice.

3 Lorraine Anderson Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 8:05 am

Teen Preg­nancy can be every mom’s worst night­mare. A child is a bless­ing, but it’s some­thing that should wait a few years more. I just read an email about the 13– year-old father who looks like a lit­tle boy. I’m not sure what the future lies for him and his new fam­ily but I hope they will make it through.

4 Nylabone Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 5:39 pm

It is a very good idea for them to wear those bel­lies around. Some­thing needs to be done to show these young girls that hav­ing a baby is seri­ous. Teen preg­nancy is on the rise and its so sad.

5 George Loughton Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 12:28 pm

In Eng­land, teen preg­nancy is a fact of life. We top the league in Europe, the doc­tors invent new ways to stop the preg­nan­cies and the papers are full of “bro­ken Britain” stuff. Does this change any­thing? No. The whole sys­tem should change and then slowly in 5–10 years time maybe we’ll see the results. But as of now, the sit­u­a­tion may only unfor­tu­nately get worse.

6 Choose Your VoIP Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 11:36 am

Reminds me of the movie Juno. Get­ting preg­nant is dif­fi­cult as it is. What more if one gets preg­nant at a young age. I saw a fea­ture on tv about a nine-year-old kid impreg­nat­ing a teenager and he does not even know what the term finan­cial is when he was asked if they were pre­pared for the baby finan­cially… it is so sad and alarm­ing at the same time…

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