8. Lack of Competing Choices- Instead of looking at teen pregnancy as something teens do unwittingly, accidentally, carelessly, or stupidly, we need to look at it instead as a type of choice.

A teen who sees her parents stay married for her entire lifetime and seem to enjoy it might unconsciously wish to do the same. She will tend to go in that direction. If she sees her mom get abused, she will unconsciously think it must be part of marriage, or think it’s ok to have this done to her, an unconscious decision, even if she articulates it different. Seeing her role models in a certain behavior will unconsciously wire her brain to follow- hence her following the Adult Birth Rate. Even if she can’t articulate why, and she can’t. Even Adults take years in therapy to figure out why they do what they do.

To have a young girl see the world in terms of choices isn’t hard to imagine. There’s all sorts of choices- every day. Friends, clothing, music, food, sports, classes, and so on.

Them there’s harder choices. College, jobs, drugs, booze, sex, boys, girls, driving, the list is endless. She is going to make many bad choices. We should be forgiving, considering we as adults screw up all the time.

As long as she sees herself going forward, she will probably be ok. As long as she feels her life is improving, she will probably make fairly sound decisions. But when she sees her life stop, when it appears to her that it’s ground to a halt, then she sees things different.

It’s a simple matter of a thing called hope. When things are bad, but she still has hope, ok, we can ride out this cold streak. But when things are bad and she senses hope to be slipping away, then things are going to be ugly. And her choices, which looked like poor and desperate choices when hope was around, start to look like better choices when hope is gone.

Going into the service, for many, might seem to be a bad or desperate choice when things were going smoothly- good grades, friends, money, a future. But pretty soon it doesn’t look so bad when the things that seemed so sure start being not so sure- being priced out of college, only minimum-wage jobs, a crumbling economy, a sad, depressed set of or single parent, poor grades, poor schools, increasing drug or alcohol use, minor brushes with the law. Suddenly you don’t have the really good choices anymore- they’re gone.

Now you have harder choices to make. Most of them aren’t good. Watching your parent(s) work poorly paying jobs. Will I go to the local JC, scrape up some cash, but you hated high school. Look for illegal ways to make some more cash?  Join the service. Booze or pot to ease the pain.  Stick with the current boyfriend, have sex, break up, get married? No insurance. No real money. No good job prospects, no good schooling prospects, mostly bad parenting, she feels herself drifting.

To may teens, the state of our world and country don’t give many a lot of hope. Read the front page of the paper. It’s unbelievably worrisome to to even the most hopeful adults. Surely we can see teens being as or more worried, and see their hope crumbling.

A teen girl will see pregnancy as just another in a long list of choices. A big one, to be sure, but it is just another choice. She sees pregnancy as a way to increase and restore her hope. She may not be able to always articulate it, but she sees it as joyful and a happy time in a not very happy world.

And remember, it’s not about the sex. It’s the child she wants for her happiness, not the sex. 15 and 16 year old girls are most likely not having good sex. Sex isn’t but a very small or nonexistent part of the happiness. It’s the child that’s going to make her happy. Being pregnant as a young teen is about everything BUT the sex.

Remember, she’s most likely poor, most likely been sexualized and/or sexually abused. She’s not planning on college, not because she doesn’t want to go, but because she can’t afford it.  She’s around violence, chaos, an unhappy upbringing. She has role models who became pregnant, most likely young. This is one way to keep her hope. Listen to Elizabeth Schroeder, PhD, long time Sexuality Educator explain how complex yet simple the reasoning is-

We should all raise a skeptical eyebrow whenever any research claims that there’s a direct cause-and-effect relationship between one thing, such as television viewing, and something as complex as teenage pregnancy. Doing so betrays an inherent ignorance of the world in which young people are living today. Teens with whom I have worked directly have given a wide range of reasons for why they became parents as teens:

“I wanted someone who would love me unconditionally.”

“I wanted my girl to have my baby.”

“I thought having a baby would make our relationship better.”

Not once in my 15 years as a sexuality educator, however, has a teenager ever said to me, “I was watching TV/a movie with sex in it, and it made me think that now might be a good time to become a parent.”

Sexuality and teen pregnancy are huge, multifaceted, complicated issues that involve very abstract, difficult-to-measure factors such as self-esteem, family involvement, socioeconomic status, racism and ethnocentrism, homophobia and much, much more. The bottom line is, if every television in America were shut off tomorrow, teen pregnancy would not go away. And rates of sexually transmitted diseases would not plummet.

Getting pregnant as a teen allows her to “stop” her world. a la Jamie Lynn Spears. The sex abuse usually stops. The young girl is seen as an adult. She’s fussed over, she’s give social services denied to her as an un-pregnant girl. She has happiness, she has something to look forward to. I would easily say that the level of happiness she might have as a pregnant teen is inversely associated with how much happiness she had before she got pregnant. A really, really un-happy teen before pregnancy? A very very happy pregnant teen. A mildly un-happy teen? She may be upset to horrified that she choose pregnancy, and may vacillate between thinking about keeping the child and trying to seek an abortion.

Where are her competing choices? Where have they gone? Down the rabbit hole of Adult Actions- greed, fiscal irresponsibility, sex abuse, poverty, bad role models, wars, crime, lack of educational purpose, religious zealotry and bigotry, ignorance, fear, leaving behind a trail of destruction for the young to navigate around and clean up.

Bottom line?  The better the the future for teens, the better the choices they have, the better the choices they’ll make.  That’s our goal as adults- to give them a future to look forward to.

Grade- Adult

Hello, it’s good to be back. I have a break in the action on the farm, and so I will continue with this manifesto on teens, adults, sex, pregnancy, society, and how it all fits.

By the way- President Obama- I hope to never get tired of hearing those words. President Barack Obama. Barack My World Mr. President. And let’s all shake the dust of that crummy little boy who went before him  off our feet once and for all.

We are talking about the Reality of why young girls choose pregnancy over a different future. It’s a social problem, not a teen behavioral problem. It’s a problem created by and carried out by Straight Adult Males, who then scapegoat teens into accepting blame for a problem they had no part in creating. The teens become a perfect villan, a patsy, someone to throw social rocks at, while the men behind the screen get a free pass.

We have covered 6 of the Dynamics. Let’s go on to #7.

 7. Lack of Reproductive Health Care- It’s no secret that the USA has no Universal Health Care. Everyone knows this. But how many countries actually have some sort of universal health care?

Afghanistan*( paid with war $), Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iraq*(paid with war $), Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. That’s who.

Now, everyone of those countries has a lower rate of teen births than the USA. Every one.

So who’s left with no universal health care besides the USA? Think all of Africa (South Africa trying), poorer Asian Countries, add poor countries like India, Pakistan, breakaway old Soviet Countries, a scattering of others, Burma, Indonesia.

All these countries who are politically stable enough to get information from have Teen Birth Rates that rival the USA, or are higher. Especially Africa, which has rates 4 times higher than the USA.

The lack of access to free and universal reproductive health care for women and teens is unforgivable, especially for a country who brags about itself as stridently as we do. Other countries see it as  basic human right. We don’t seem to see it that way.  Our words and actions don’t meet at all.

When a teen girl gets access to health care, she opens a dialogue with a trusted professional. He or she may become a role model. Her health is placed first, not the mom’s, not the younger sisters. Hers. We are starting on the path to PREVENTION of pregnancy. We are ACTING, not REACTING. PROACTIVE.

Look at all the things discussed- eating right, exercise, drugs, vaccines, stress, sleep, disease, viruses, contraception, all this can be discussed BEFORE she becomes sexually active. She should have free and unfettered access to any and all contraceptives whenever she and her doctor decide. It’s NOT the parents decision, nor is it the teachers, the politicians, or the City Council. It’s a decision between her and her doctor.

Here is a recent statement put out by Aboutkidshealth, an on-line site devoted to keeping kids and adults healthy and smart

Recent and alarming American statistics about the rates of pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in teenage girls have re-ignited the highly charged debate about access to health care and sex education in the United States. A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report showed that about 25% of all girls between the ages of 14 and 19 in the US were infected with at least one of the most common STIs. These included human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus, and trichomoniasis. The spread of all these diseases, some of which cannot be cured with antibiotics, can be reduced with safer sex practices. 

“The problem isn’t promiscuity,” says Kim Martyn, a Toronto-based sex educator. “It comes down to poverty and access to health care and education.” The report also showed black teen girls had much higher rates of infection than white girls, which Martyn says proves her point. “In the US, there is a huge gap in terms of health care access between the white and black population.”

Martyn says opportunity, or lack thereof, also has an influence on behaviour. “If you have a vision of yourself going to university, you are more motivated to not get pregnant. You are more likely to be responsible,” adding that these attitudes are reflected in statistics about the age at which teens first have sex. 

 I’m not the only one who sees the dynamics behind the TBR as Adult-influenced. Ms. Martyn cleary shows the link between social causes, including poverty, lack of clear, non-biased sexual information, freedom to reproductive based health care, a vision of a better future, and who will and won’t get pregnant as a teen.

Now, George Bush has left us, thankfully, but cleaning up his debris and hubris will take years. Read what Martin Donohoe, Professor of Medicine and and Ethics Scholar writes about some of the crap Bush has forced us to deal with.

Recently ( written in 2003), the Bush administration drafted a policy that would let states define unborn children as persons eligible for medical coverage. The current Administration has also introduced bills to increase the $3 million per year already spent on so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” in which pregnant women are given non-factual information regarding abortion, refused information about contraception, shown an ultrasound of their fetus, and watch a slide show depicting bloody aborted fetuses in which it is claimed that abortion is a leading cause of sterility, deformed children and death. In fact, it is 30 times more dangerous to carry a fetus to term than to undergo a legal abortion. The availability of mifepristone (RU-486) for medical pregnancy termination has the potential to improve women’s access to safe abortion. 

Abortions cost approximately $350; most patients pay out of pocket. Only one out of three patients has insurance coverage, and only one out of three insurance companies cover the procedure after the deductible is met. Thirty- four states provide no Medicaid funding for abortion; of the 16 that provide coverage, most make it available only in cases of fetal abnormality, rape, or when the pregnant woman’s life is endangered or health at risk because of the pregnancy (see “Georgia’s Abortion Bill,” Z Magazine, January 2003). Often patients are reluctant to file claims due to confidentiality concerns. 

Other obstacles to abortion include bans on specific methods, mandated waiting periods, parental and spousal notification laws, regulation of abortion facility locations, zoning ordinances designed to keep abortion clinics from being built in certain areas, and TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws. Bills already approved by the House of Representatives, and headed for the Republican-majority Senate, include: the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which gives legal status to a fetus hurt or killed during the commission of a federal crime; the Child Custody Protection Act, which makes it a crime in some cases to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion; and the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act, forbidding state and local government actions against hospitals or health care to workers who refuse to participate in abortions. Three recent appointments to the Food and Drug Administration’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, Drs. David Hager, Susan Crockett and Joseph Stanford, are avowed foes of abortion rights. Obstetrician-gynecologist Hager, who has advocated Scripture reading and prayer for premenstrual syndrome, reportedly refuses to provide contraceptives to unmarried woman.

More from Dr. Martin-

Lack of access to contraception facilitates teen pregnancy. Only 8 percent of U.S. high schools provide condoms, despite the fact that promotion and distribution of condoms does not increase teen sexual activity. Access to contraception of all types is particularly burdensome for rural teens. Recently, legislation that would prohibit prescribed contraceptives for adolescents without parental involvement was introduced in ten states and the U.S. Congress. A survey of girls younger than 18 seeking services at Planned Parenthood found that mandatory notification for prescribed contraceptives would impede girls’ use of sexual health care services, potentially increasing teen pregnancies and the spread of STDs. 

Across the U.S., many health plans fail to cover all contraceptive methods, even though all methods are more effective and less costly than no method. Many fewer plans cover abortion than cover sterilization, leaving poor women in the unenviable position of having to choose sterilization if they lack the resources for adequate contraception or for an abortion (which may become necessary even when accepted contraceptive methods are used as directed). On a positive note, the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to reinstate the contraceptive coverage for federal employees that President Bush omitted in his 2002 budget proposal. 

It can’t be any clearer- Having little or no reproductive health care is a shameless, hypocritical way to treat our young women, and without it, we cannot cut down on the number of teen pregnancies. Where the hell are the condoms that every school in America should be distributing freely? Where the hell is the Universal Heath Care? Where the hell is our money? Why do we tell adults they are happy, healthy, normal and right for wanting and having sex, but we tell our teens they are wrong, dirty, immoral, unethical for wanting the same?

We’ll talk about this strange phenomena at the end when we discuss the abstinence crockery. But now, let’s move on to the next dynamic.

Grade- Adult

Yes it’s that day again, where we come up with a reason to celebrate our gridiron heroes. So all of you who enjoy football, we say-Go Steelers!

I’m less interested this year, mostly because I am getting tired of athletes in general. Not sports- I like sports, especially participating, although age and injuries slow me down, but I am pretty tired of the pampered, overrated, rich, smug overpaid illiterate, “the world revolves around me” athlete.

Such is life though. I am also tired of the overrated politician, the overrated superintendent, the overrated school board trustee, the overrated parent, and so on and so forth.

It’s early in the morn and we’re off to the Farmer’s Market to make some money. Am I overrated? Maybe, but I hope not. At least the dog doesn’t think so.

This week I’ll be finishing up the Teen Pregnancy Manifesto, and whoa Nelly!, have I been taking some shit for my views. I have been called out-of-date, out-of-touch, blind, sex-obsessed, know-nothing, and completely stupid. I wrote a rebuttal on The Huffington Post about the reality behind the TBR (teen birth rate) and I was reamed by teens who told me that if the teen girls who get pregnant would just knuckle down and get their shit together, not to mention keep their legs together,  they too, could accomplish their dreams.

Ahhh, ’tis a sad thing to feel unloved. To be castigated by the very souls whom you are trying to help. People keep equating teen sex with teen pregnancy-Not true. Stop it. Now.

After I finish that up, I have two special posts about our friends Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin. Then I will put it all together with a post about one small town called Perris, where I show how ignoring this very disturbing social problem will completely and utterly destroy the fabric of the town, and all the people in it. Only the stupid and ignorant ignore this.

Ok Josh, I’m back. And finally, a big hello to Melba R. Thanks for reading along. I hope I make it worth your time.