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 ...Professor R. Scott Appleby might have noted the statistics that show these girls and their children are more at risk of dropping out, getting low-paying job, using drugs, going to prison and suffering from abuse than those who practice the oppressive morality taught by the Catholic Church.
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.
Come to think of it, whose morality is really oppressive after all?
The note at the end is kind of touching.
ReplyDeleteI think it's particularly noteworthy that there was a strong implication that (a) a lot of these girls were, themselves, children of unmarried mothers, and (b)the hint in passing that at least a few of them might have become pregnant on purpose, to get increased public assistance. I wonder how much of this is just because some fraction of these girls just aren't convinced that there is much of a down side to getting pregnant.
ReplyDeleteI'm also annoyed by the fact that the article is all about the girls. It takes two to make a pregnancy, why isn't anybody grabbing the *boys* by the ears, and shaking them down to support and take responsibility for the kids they helped make? What with modern DNA testing, the old argument of "But the kid might not be mine!" is a lot more hollow than it used to be.
I think we'd see a very precipitous drop in the teen pregnancy rate if the boys had as much to lose as the girls do, rather than just getting to walk away like they often do now.
Based on prior patterns, there's probably a much smaller pool of males involved.
ReplyDeleteThe boys have as much, or more, to lose as the girls-- law requires that their income goes to support the kid, and they don't even have any right to see the kids.
Thing is, they tend to not be good providers in the first place, and if he's got seven kids by five different women, they can't get any more from his minimum-wage jog than they do for one kid, and there's no reason for him to apply himself-- it'll just go to the kid that society has taught him his entire life is the woman's.
Oh, on top of that, the mother has incentive to not go after him too much-- gov't assistance is greatly reduced by having the father around, and even more so if you're married. Much wiser to try to get pregnant by a different guy, one who might send in a whole new child support check.