Pregnancy Pact Or No...
Here's a brave editorial from Sarah Edell that's taking a lot of heat over at LoHud.com
The recent news articles about the 17 girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts who are expecting babies--more than four times the number of pregnancies that the 1,200--student school had in the 2007 school year--point to a phenomena alternately attributed to a "pregnancy pact" and a statistical blip.
Regardless of whether a pregnancy pact existed among the 17 high school students, and regardless of whether they were using birth control or received sex education, the publicity surrounding the pregnancies is an opportunity to open the conversation on teen pregnancy in the United States, and to evaluate if either access to education and birth control or abstinence are the real issues. Rather, I believe feminism is the ultimate issue.
A woman owns her body at any age. Women should be able to control their fertility the moment it begins. And her desires and the intellectual understanding she has of her own desires are valid at any age or education level. These 17 Gloucester women, and Jamie Lynn Spears, for that matter, chose sex. They got pregnant and they chose to continue their pregnancies in spite of financial autonomy in our culture. We must seek to understand this desire, and we must respect it.
Their decisions are not necessarily representative of broad social failing toward these women, but rather, I suspect, a sign that we still have not been able to reconcile feminism with our antiquated sense of autonomy. We assume that it is better to wait until a mother can independently and financially provide for her child. Yet in traditional cultures, it is an entire family and community that provide for children. We have isolated child-rearing to this elite, moneyed, relatively old strata of society, when it is so natural for young women to pursue pregnancy. Is it not rather smart of these women to get pregnant at 15, while they are still young, have few material worries, and can be confident their families and the welfare system will help them? In contrast, it was rather foolish of me, at 35 and the dawn of my career, to have gotten pregnant, when American middle-class work culture is so virulently antagonistic to working motherhood. And, together, with youthful energy and shared experience, these women will have a community of co-mothers to rely upon. I envy that.
Yes, statistics do suggest that "unwed mothers" - a ghastly, sexist term - and "teenage mothers" suffer greater poverty than "wed mothers over 20," yet the fundamental problem is not being unwed or young, but rather a culture that places financial self-reliance over community. The solution is complex: Create a culture where laws, social programs and work culture embrace child rearing at any age, and respect a woman's right to control her fertility throughout her life. Reconciliation of women's reproductive capability and desires, with Western democracy, capitalism and American society in a way that respects gender equality as a whole, is the ultimate task before us as a culture.
Consciously or not, the 17 Gloucester students did their best to reconcile the forces in their own lives. That effort is feminism.
The recent news articles about the 17 girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts who are expecting babies--more than four times the number of pregnancies that the 1,200--student school had in the 2007 school year--point to a phenomena alternately attributed to a "pregnancy pact" and a statistical blip.
Regardless of whether a pregnancy pact existed among the 17 high school students, and regardless of whether they were using birth control or received sex education, the publicity surrounding the pregnancies is an opportunity to open the conversation on teen pregnancy in the United States, and to evaluate if either access to education and birth control or abstinence are the real issues. Rather, I believe feminism is the ultimate issue.
A woman owns her body at any age. Women should be able to control their fertility the moment it begins. And her desires and the intellectual understanding she has of her own desires are valid at any age or education level. These 17 Gloucester women, and Jamie Lynn Spears, for that matter, chose sex. They got pregnant and they chose to continue their pregnancies in spite of financial autonomy in our culture. We must seek to understand this desire, and we must respect it.
Their decisions are not necessarily representative of broad social failing toward these women, but rather, I suspect, a sign that we still have not been able to reconcile feminism with our antiquated sense of autonomy. We assume that it is better to wait until a mother can independently and financially provide for her child. Yet in traditional cultures, it is an entire family and community that provide for children. We have isolated child-rearing to this elite, moneyed, relatively old strata of society, when it is so natural for young women to pursue pregnancy. Is it not rather smart of these women to get pregnant at 15, while they are still young, have few material worries, and can be confident their families and the welfare system will help them? In contrast, it was rather foolish of me, at 35 and the dawn of my career, to have gotten pregnant, when American middle-class work culture is so virulently antagonistic to working motherhood. And, together, with youthful energy and shared experience, these women will have a community of co-mothers to rely upon. I envy that.
Yes, statistics do suggest that "unwed mothers" - a ghastly, sexist term - and "teenage mothers" suffer greater poverty than "wed mothers over 20," yet the fundamental problem is not being unwed or young, but rather a culture that places financial self-reliance over community. The solution is complex: Create a culture where laws, social programs and work culture embrace child rearing at any age, and respect a woman's right to control her fertility throughout her life. Reconciliation of women's reproductive capability and desires, with Western democracy, capitalism and American society in a way that respects gender equality as a whole, is the ultimate task before us as a culture.
Consciously or not, the 17 Gloucester students did their best to reconcile the forces in their own lives. That effort is feminism.
posted by Contact at 4:13 PM
2 Comments:
I got pregnant when I was 17, and the hardest thing about that has been that when it happened I didn't yet know what I wanted for my life. I couldn't see that far yet. Now I wish I had waited. And I want to share that with other young women, but I don't think I can make anyone see something they cannot yet see. Certainly, no one could have made me see.
Having a baby when you're over 20, married, and with a bachelors degree does not guarantee ANYtHING.
It makes you feel like an idiot to be the above while living with the mother-in-law to make ends meet and still not know what you want for your life.
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