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From the same Chicago schools system that saw 16-year-old Derrion Albert bludgeoned to death, another troubling story:
It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit.
It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common –
something you might find disturbing. ...
All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High
School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood
school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention
talk.
If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.
Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood ... To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.
Why is it happening at Robeson?
Good bloody question. We've all heard about the same thing happening in the white, working-class enclave of Glouscester, Mass. This state of affairs seems a far cry from the infamous Grease scene wherein the drive-in crowd plays telephone with the news that "Rizzo's got a bun in the oven." At Robeson, no one seems to care that over a hundred young women are now raising children alone (the write-up barely mentions any male co-conspirators or caretakers). Even the article's author seems careful to hedge on whether one "might" find the pregnancy epidemic "disturbing" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Torie, you wondered whether MTV's show 16 and Pregnant
will encourage teenage moms-to-be to consider adoption. At least one
pro-life group hopes so: Lifeline Adoption oversees several
pro-adoption websites, including the fortuitously-named 16andpregnant.com.
Fans of the show who type in that URL won't get a site about the show.
They'll get one aimed at girls who are precisely that: 16 and pregnant.
At first glance it's a relatively generic, "We know you're scared, here
are your options," sort of site, but it quickly becomes it clear that
the site designers really only have one option in mind ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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I've aged out of almost all of MTV's programming—watching barely legal
20-somethings binge drink grain alcohol on various incarnations of the Real World is no longer my idea of entertainment. But I've caught a few episodes of the MTV series 16 and Pregnant, and althought I'm not the target audience, I have found the show to be pretty riveting stuff ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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The Palin family's message machine seems to have gone haywire of late. Governor
Sarah has plastered on her serious face, forswearing this month's White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington to concentrate on the recession
in Alaska. She sent her husband to D.C. instead to hang with Greta Van Susteren
but say nothing to the cameras. At one WHCA post-party, former Palin
running-mate-in-law Meghan McCain seemed confused about how to deal with... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Willa, I haven’t yet seen 17 Again, but after reading you on it, I want to. Not because the movie looks particularly enticing (the mere notion of Zac Efron aging into Matthew Perry is depressing beyond belief), but because I'm interested in the way it folds time travel and body-switching into a narrative of teen pregnancy. Time-travel plots are, of course, always about the fantasy of going back and changing the present by doing things differently in the past. It's worth noting, too, that those fantasies often involve motherhood or the possibility of a child: Keep Sarah Connor alive so her unborn son can lead the revolution! Ew, Marty McFly, don’t make out with your own future mom!
Yet even though this movie explicitly sets up the fact that Zac’s character is unhappy in his adult life because of the choices he made as a teen (ie, unprotected sex, having the child, marrying the girl), it sounds like those choices are ultimately affirmed in a feel-good ending. Even if he had the power to turn back time, Zac loves his family so much he wouldn’t have donned that condom. Everyone who’s already a parent gets the paradox of that logic: Once your child exists, it's hard to imagine a world without him. But for crushed-out adolescent girls not long on foresight, there’s a thin line between “Now that my unplanned-for child is here, I’d do anything for her,” and “Woo hoo, let’s make babies with Zac Efron!” The fuzzy-brained hypocrisy of the scene you describe, in which the body-switched Zac recommends abstinence over condoms to a group of high-schoolers including his own daughter, makes Bristol Palin sound like a savvy life coach by comparison. In her words: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”
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17 Again, a film about a 38-year-old named Mike with a sucky life who gets to go back to being 17, when he looked like Tiger Beat pin-up Zac Efron, opens today. ("What is Zac Efron?" Manohla Dargis wonders in in today's Times. He does have a space-alien quality—those vacant, kewpie doll eyes—but he's just the newest model in an old line of cars that go fast, for a short period of time. Think David Cassidy, Kirk Cameron, The Backstreet Boys). Why does Mike's life suck? Well, he just lost a promotion and quit his job, he's getting a divorce and his kids hate him—but the more fundamental reason that his life stinks is that Mike chose to become a teen father.
See, when Mike was 17, and a star basketball player with a bright future, his pretty girlfriend informed him she was with child. He decided to do the "right thing" (as EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "Levi Johnston, consider yourself schooled.") and happily married his sweetheart. But 20 years later, Mike's decision has had unpleasant consequences. Mike never went to college, so he's been overlooked time and time again for a promotion. He's also spent the last two decades bitterly resenting his wife and kids for the sacrifices he made to be with them. Sacrifices that have kept him from the life he thinks he should have, and could have, had. So Mike wishes he could be 17 again, before he gave up his future for his family.
Unsurprisingly, the film goes out of its way to neutralize this message—that teen parenthood might require enormous, painful sacrifices that don't always pay off—by having Mike "realize," thanks to his repeat performance as a 17-year-old, that his wife and kids are the most important thing in his life and he really ought to appreciate them more.
The movie is schizophrenic about teenagers, sex and responsibility in other ways as well. When Mike returns to high school and condoms are being distributed in his health class he makes an impassioned plea for abstinence. This is played for laughs—Mike's daughter is in his class, and of course he doesn't want her having sex-—but since we know Mike was having sex in high school, and obviously without condoms, it's unfathomably short sighted. Wouldn't this man, of all men, know the importance of protection? Probably, but then he'd have to advocate condom usage—and God forbid a film intended for real teenagers do anything like that.
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Dana, perhaps I should not have compared Elizabeth Cousins to Bristol Palin; Cousins never offered herself as a spokesperson for anything, except herself and her own experience. While I agree with you all about preventing teen pregnancy, Cousins' baby is already here. She should be commended for rising to the occasion, rather than roundly chastised. In addition, I don't think Bristol Palin's example paints a realistic picture of teen motherhood, and in fact could be accused of glamorizing it: She remains living in her mother's mansion with ample help from her wealthy family and a nationally televised platform. Sure, Levi embarrassed her, but I'd bet when at least some teens saw him on Tyra, they were swooningly jealous of Bristol having such a dreamy boyfriend.
Emily, at the end of the day, I think we're all products of our own environments. Elizabeth Cousins and Bristol Palin both come from peer groups where teen pregnancy is rampant and opportunities for the future are limited. I sincerely doubt the kind of teen who is watching multimedia presentations on the New York Times website would hear Cousins' story and say to herself, "Having a baby now sounds like a great idea!" She'd be the kind of teen who would be well aware at how much she had to lose.
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We've spilled a lot of digital ink talking about teen motherhood, though most of us have not been adolescent moms ourselves, so I thought I would post this New York Times package, which includes the narration of Elizabeth Cousins, a 16-year-old from East Flatbush, N.Y., and the mother of 19-month-old Mahniya. Bristol Palin could take some lessons on clarity and maturity from Elizabeth, who seems to have a real head on her shoulders. Elizabeth says she considered abortion, but ultimately decided against it because a friend pointed out that this could be her only shot at motherhood.
Elizabeth used to stay out all night partying, but having Mahniya has given her new focus on her studies, and the Times notes that Mahniya's father takes care of the baby several days a week while Elizabeth commutes to an alternative public school on the Upper East Side. For now, Elizabeth says she has "retired" from the motherhood business—she doesn't want to have any more kids until she has her future more settled.
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As we try to craft the Platonic ideal of the teen sex talk, I have a few thoughts. Like Hanna, I’m all for mixed (or, to be more precise, layered) messages. I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical or unloving about delivering up a combo platter of threats and promises: Having sex in high school is a lousy idea (but if you’re really going to do it, make sure you use protection.) If you get pregnant in high school, your future is screwed six ways from Sunday (but if it happens anyway, I’ll stick by you whatever you choose to do.) After all, much of adult life functions on this kind of more-than-binary logic: For example, most marriages operate on the assumption that cheating is intolerable, but when infidelity does happen, it’s often worth working through the problem and staying together.
God knows Levi and Bristol could have used a bit more negative capability (the capacity to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time) as they embarked on their ill-considered journey toward parenthood. What’s most maddening in their press appearances is the way that, enabled by fatuous interviewers, they blur together their crappy decision-making with its, in some sense, happy outcome (a baby, even an unplanned one, is bound to be a source of joy.) I could have throttled Tyra Banks when she said to Levi, “If [Bristol] could wave a magic wand, she’d have preferred to wait ten years.” Magic wands are notoriously ineffective as a means of birth control. Like Jessica's mom, I’d rather arm my daughter with a stern warning, an implied promise, and a five-dollar box of condoms.
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Emily, Levi's interview with Tyra Banks yesterday may have been catnip for haters, but it was mostly just a sad, sordid business. In the clip below (via HuffPo), Levi is just a moose caught in headlights. His affect is a combination of uncomfortable and dim, and it seems like his sister Mercede is running the show (which may explain the choice of interviewers). When asked why he no longer sees Tripp as much as he wants to, Levi told Tyra, "I think [Bristol] and my sister have got in some fights, and I don't think she trusts my sister." While he remained mum for the second part of the show, Levi did say that he and Bristol didn't always use condoms and that Sarah Palin did not force him to propose—nor did she force him to get "Bristol" tattooed on his ring finger. If Levi's learned anything from this experience, it's not to get someone's name etched on himself. "I wouldn't recommend it," he said. Check out Levi and his family below, and pray that Levi chooses to pull back from the press (and chooses to use condoms consistently). He would benefit from an injection of normalcy in his life, even if Sarah Palin continues to be in the public eye.
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More on the permutations of parenthood: I wonder what to make of this 2005 Census table about "self-care" among children of various ages, up to 15. It seems like some indicator, however rough, of the supervisory ethos in families (though I can't figure out how much variation is encompassed by self-care-regular long stretches, shorter interludes, or what). If I'm reading it correctly, it seems to confirm Liza's hunch that there may not be a class schism between hovering-haves and hands-off-have-nots. In fact, if anything, it suggests the trend may not tend the way we think. It looks as though the more education and the higher the income a mother has, the more likely it is her 11- 14-year-old kids spend some time fending for themselves. This isn't what I would have expected. And obviously, it doesn't tell us anything about the situations of kids older than 15, among whom birth rates are creeping up (while staying steady among 11- 14-year-olds). There, too, class differences can surprise you. As Margaret Talbot's great New Yorker article "Red Sex, Blue Sex" suggests, less-educated parents who run a tight ship don't necessarily inculcate sexual self-control in kids, just as more affluent liberal parents big on youthful autonomy can produce some pretty strait-laced teenagers.
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Amy Sullivan has a great piece in Time this week about the answer to the tired old abstinence debate we are about to launch into. Everyone fights over whether or not to mention condoms, she says, when the reality is that most students get no sex ed at all. Only one state requires schools to spend any specific amount of time talking about sex ed. When schools do, they might detail a gym teacher in his or her spare time to do the job. Sullivan says we already know from the research what is the most effective program: comprehensive sex ed, sometimes known as abstinence plus. She then profiles what she considers a model program in South Carolina, where a group of educators bypassed the culture war and constructed a program tailored to the realities of teen lives.
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While we're on the subject of teen sex, I thought I'd raise this post from Constantino Diaz-Duran at the Daily Beast. He describes the case of two 17-year-olds from Sheboygan, Wisc., who were arrested for having sex with their 14-year-old significant others. Same town, same age difference, same assistant district attorney. But one of the 17-year-olds was charged with a class C felony (maximum sentence: 40 years in prison), and the other was charged with a misdemeanor (maximum sentence: nine months in jail).
Why the disparity? In one case, it was a 17-year-old guy sleeping with his 14-year-old girlfriend; in the other, the sexes were reversed.
Diaz-Duran asks if the "boy was a victim of gender bias." Certainly it seems that his gender influenced the charge. But maybe that's as it should be. Yes, a 17-year-old female is capable of causing harm to an innocent 14-year-old with her sexuality, just as is her male counterpart. But men tend to be bigger, stronger, and have more parts that they can force into you. That's a crucial difference, and one that explains to some extent why rape laws would (and should) treat the sexes differently.
Gender discrimination aside, statutory rape laws do seem problematic. Obviously we should protect youngsters from the Humbert Humberts of the world. But what about teens whose sexual relations are totally consentual, like the case of Genarlow Wilson? (And yes, I do think teenagers are emotionally capable of coming to such mutual decisions.) In those situations, it seems like the statutory rape card is just a way for angry parents to convince themselves that their own child is pure by pinning the dirty sex act on someone else. And too often, those angry parents may be reacting to something other than actual predatory behavior, such as a boyfriend they don't approve of.
I'm curious, especially in the context of yesterday's discussion about the balance of raising kids who are safe but independent, how others—especially Emily B. and Dahlia—feel about statutory rape laws. Can't there be a better way of protecting against genuine predators without ensnaring teens engaged in consentual sex?
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Hanna and Jessica, perhaps complacency that teen pregnancy rates had been successfully declining for so long, and perhaps ineffective abstinence-only education has something to do with the disturbing rise in young unwed motherhood. But my favorite theory is that such sexual behavior is culturally transmitted. While teen pregnancy rates have started to rise a little, among women ages 20 to 24 who give birth, 60 percent are having those kids of out wedlock. For a large segment of our society, it has become the normal thing to do. But if you're 22 and just had a baby, that probably means you haven't gone to college. As Kay Hymowitz has written, unwed motherhood is the greatest engine of social inequality in this country. There are actually very few Murphy Browns—college-educated professionals deciding to raise children on their own. College-educated women, as Hymowitz writes, have a life script and things follow in sequence: education, career, marriage, children. Following this order means their children will follow the same script. This has broken down for large segments of our population. There is no shame or embarrassment at out-of-wedlock birth anymore; there is often the sense this is a better way to go than getting married (as if the child's father would even entertain getting hitched) and inevitably getting divorced. The year-by-year increase in out-of-wedlock births in this country shows how self-perpetuating this is. What the statistics don't show is the suffering of children whose longing to have a father will be unmet, and who are being raised by overwhelmed mothers.
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I have some convincing theories about the rise of teen pregnancy and AIDS cases, Hanna! Let's start with the increased percentage of pregnant adolescents. In an article that "XX Factor" friend Margaret Talbot wrote for The New Yorker last year called "Red Sex, Blue Sex" she quotes sociologist Mark Regnerus on teens who delay sexual activity:
They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.
Hanna, you note that the Latino population has seen a particularly notable spike in teen pregnancy, and that doesn't surprise me. As an article in Sunday's New York Times about the education of nonnative English speakers showed, there are near-impossible barriers for recent immigrants that prevent them from the "bright futures" Regnerus speaks of. The Times article quotes a 19-year-old Guatemalan woman named Amalia Raymundo, who "was a rising star in her remote village in Guatemala, the region’s beauty queen and a candidate for college scholarships." Because of her experiences in American public school, Amalia saw that her dreams of becoming a doctor were so far out of her reach, she thought about dropping out. “If I am going to end up cleaning houses with my mother ... why go to high school?”
If that's the reality for most recent immigrant women, why would they delay sex or prevent pregnancy? What's the motivation? Which brings me to my next point: I think AIDS is on the rise because condom promotion has all but disappeared and AIDS is no longer seen as a death sentence. If you don't believe you're going to die, and many think sex feels better without a condom, what's the motivation for use? In addition, as Talbot wrote in her New Yorker article, "many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease." So you have informed people who choose to take the risk because they think AIDS won't happen to them, and you have underinformed people who think that condoms don't work. Those taken together seem like enough to cause a statistical increase.
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Today's news brings us a few dispatches from the land of reckless teendom. Here we have some high schoolers in the Bronx who, upon viewing a picture of pop singer Rihanna's bruised face, remarked "She probably made him mad for him to react like that"—him being her still-boyfriend, Chris Brown. More importantly, we have the latest stats on the Bristol Palin constituency. Teen birth rates among 15- to 19-year-olds have been creeping up for a few years, "putting one of the nation's most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy," writes the Washington Post. Given the Obama administration's latest pledge to take politics out of science, we will likely be treated now to fierce debate on the morning talk shows about the effectiveness of abstinence education. True, those programs have been much less effective than the Bush administration lets on. And I would love to put the blame all on them. But I imagine the causes are much more complicated than that. For one thing, it can't be a coincidence that the AIDS virus is also increasing. Condom vigilance waxes and wanes, and we are probably coming out of a lazy period. Also, check out the list of which states have the highest increases. Many are places with relatively recent waves of immigration. The most interesting sub trend is about young Latino rates of teen pregnancy, which are now the highest in the country.
Anybody know any other convincing theories?
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