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So, once again, that old canard about red states and teen pregnancy has reared its ugly head. "Red states have more teen pregnancies and more abortions than blue states."
And it's come to my attention that we're getting it for our abstinence education. Well, I'm against one and for the other--
For starters, let's look at the standard "what you do when you grow up" timeline. For a lot of people, it goes like this:
1. Go to school
2. Graduate
3. Get a job and get married, in some order.
4. Once you're married and settled in financially, have kids.
Lots of people want children desperately, and some don't mind the idea and think that it's a pleasant responsibility (i.e. they might personally be happy without children if they can't have any, but they feel that they ought to if they can). I don't think I'm out of line here in saying that many people plan to have children and look forward to it.
Someone who's planning to attend college has a GREAT reason to put off having kids-- they have negative income in college (loans, ya know) and won't have any insurance, plus the huge time sink that college is. Once they're out of college, they'll have a good job with benefits (they hope!) and more income, and putting off the fun of having children until then seems like a really good idea. (Please note that I'm talking here about people who very much want children and who are planning the decision of WHEN to have them, not IF.)
Now, what about someone who's not attending college? They graduate high school, get a job, and maybe get married to someone they like a lot. Is there a REAL benefit to waiting 3-4 years to have their first child? Not really. They're not going to have a huge jump in earnings potential in 3-4 years, and there might be a recession that puts them out of a job entirely.
Is there a REAL benefit to having their first child right then? Yes, there is-- if you aren't going away to school, chances are you're going to be living significantly closer to your parents. Being able to count on your parents for advice, help watching the children, and so on is INVALUABLE. And, well, they aren't getting any younger, so waiting a few years may simply mean that your parents are older and not in as good a shape to help you, or your younger siblings may have kids and suck up some of their time, and so on.
So, looking at the reasons you may want to have children as soon as you finish your education, they apply about equally to college graduates and non-college-attending people. However, the non-college types have one big stigma attached-- they're having children right after high school, which makes them TEEN PARENTS. No, wait, no one gives a shit about the fathers here-- we don't ever see anything about teenaged fathers. This is about TEENAGED MOMS. (Works best to the tune of "Tainted Love," if you're humming along.)
Let's look at the actual numbers. Here in Oklahoma, 65% of our "teen pregnancies" are to women ages 18-19. (Nationally, it's 63%.) By my reckoning and that of the law, those are grownup women who are choosing to become mothers. This is not about children having their innocence stolen, it's about adults, often married ones, choosing to start their family as soon as they've finished their education. The stigma happens because we happen to be less educated than people in "blue states" on the average.
If you are going to attach a stigma to people for not being more educated, it is not fair to attach it only to women who choose to have children when younger. In fact, it's rather sexist. Do we talk about the "teenaged man new car purchasing problem" where young men aged 18-19 buy cars they can barely afford without having any money saved in case they are out of work for a couple of weeks? No, we don't, we focus this on those naughty, naughty "girls" and what they're doing with their uteruses this season!
Now, as far as I'm concerned, there may be some good reasons to track things like this. But let's look at some quotes from "Teen Pregnancy Prevention Facts About Oklahoma 2004" (where I got the above numbers) available here in non-PDF format.
FACT: "Eight to 12 years after birth, a child born to a teen who is
unmarried and has dropped out of high school is 10 times more
likely to be living in poverty than a child born to a mother having
none of these characteristics."
So, let's interpret that. A child whose mother was an unmarried high school dropout at the time they were born, is more likely to live in poverty than a child whose mother was a married high school graduate age 20 and up.
Gee, that's more obvious than words can say. More education = more money. Duh! So, what about comparing children born to teenaged mothers versus born to older mothers of the same educational level? Or comparing teen mothers, some who finished high school and some who didn't? Married versus unmarried? You can't compare two things with three different factors and then say "oh, this is because they're teenagers!" It's NOT because their mums were teens, they're living in poverty because their mothers started off poor!
FACT: (more scary numbers here) "At present, Haskell county has the highest three year average teen birth rate at 104.5 per 1,000 females age 15-19, which
relates to 45 actual births in 2002."
Let's translate that into real numbers. Of the female population aged 15-19, which was 430 girls and women, 45 had a baby. Now let's assume that the same 65% ratio applies here (assumption, I know, but probably not too far off). Twenty-eight of those births were thus to young women aged 18-19, and 17 were to girls aged 15-17.
Now I ask those of you with children, or who want to have children in the near future: How would it make you feel if you and your spouse's joyously planned-for and welcomed child was included as a statistic here, or included as a data point in dozens of fervent lectures across the state about "how not to make the mistake of teen pregnancy"?
For thousands of women across Oklahoma, this is the case. These women are adults, legally able to sign contracts, hold credit cards, drive vehicles, join the military, own or manage businesses, or get married. And yet, despite all these legal trappings of adulthood, we're still stigmatizing their choice to have children?
Now, there are some fairly decent arguments relating to this. I'm sure that teenaged mothers are, as a whole, more likely to get aid from WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a nutrition program) or other sources of aid. Yet I point out that income for a high school graduate doesn't really increase steeply-- you're going to make the same amount of money at 22 that you did at 18, and if you were going to be on an assistance program then you will STILL need that assistance program at 22.
Another argument is that teen mothers are more likely to face spousal abuse than non-teen mothers. Guess what, it's an economics issue again-- non-teen mothers, like other women their age, make more money and can afford counseling or afford to leave. Also, the same thing would happen if we randomly married 100 16-year-olds to their current date and compared them to 100 25-year-olds married to whoever they were currently dating.
FACT: (here's a fun one!) Only 4 in 10 teenaged mothers who become pregnant before finishing high school ever attain their high school diploma. BUT-- fully HALF of teen mothers dropped out of school before becoming pregnant!!
Interpretation: 5 out of 10 teenaged mothers left school for some other reason before ever becoming pregnant. 4 out of 10 returned (or didn't drop out) and got their diploma. Only 1 of 10 dropped out after becoming pregnant and never returned. It sounds to me like the issue isn't about pregnancy keeping them from an education, and we ought to find out what IS keeping them!
Basically, it comes down to this. We're blowing up this "teen pregnancy" issue by taking the REAL problem (say, the 113 girls aged 14 and under who got pregnant in Oklahoma in 2004) and adding in other people to increase the appearance of the problem (say, the 5,084 babies born to 18- and 19-year-old women). This is wrong because it's bad statistics, and it's also wrong because it's using the choices of legal adults to stigmatize them as children who aren't able to make decisions for themselves and who deserve government aid.
And what government aid are we talking about here? "Abstinence education." Which doesn't work, for two reasons:
1. As we've seen, the HUGE MAJORITY of "teen pregnancy" is among legal adults, and this being Oklahoma (hey! #2 divorce rate in the nation) I can promise you that a lot of those are young women in the 18-19 range who have gotten married. "Abstain until marriage" only works if you're not going to bitch about the women who get married and have children!
2. As a Christian, I fully believe that chastity is a religious decision. Chastity, or being chaste, does not mean never having sex-- it's a lifelong decision of having sex only when the time is right. This can include things like:
a) waiting until marriage to have sex
b) not having sex after a divorce until you are remarried
c) not having sex after a divorce unless you reconcile with your ex
d) refraining from sneaking off to masturbate within marriage on the grounds that it takes something away from your partner
e) trying not to fantasize about other people while with your partner
f) trying not to think naughty thoughts about people who aren't available to you
g) doing your best in bed for your partner and having sex as an expression of your marriage vows along with an expression of your hormones
h) using sex to re-kindle romance between you, or re-connect
i) thinking happy thoughts about how hot and wonderful they are, even when you can't be together
And many, many other choices. Chastity is about seeing sexuality as a wonderful, awesome gift from God, and about listening to what you think He wants you to do with it. It's not anti-sex any more than barbecuing is anti-fire-- you just want to keep the fire contained and useful, not all over the lawn endangering people. More to the point, though, chastity is doing what God wants you to do.
What's the point of "abstinence education" which is chastity without God? It's like giving kids crackers and juice because you've heard that people who take Communion are less prone to violence. It's not in the crackers and juice, it's what's in your heart when you do it! (Or, um, for you folks on the pro-transsubstantiation side, it's in the crackers and juice AND your heart.)
Teaching children "not to have sex" without teaching them to feel the joyful promise of chastity is blasphemous, and the sort of arrogant pseudo-Christianity that makes me want to spit at people. You can't lead someone to Christ by dragging them by the naughty bits, folks. If you want to have a multi-faith "let's not get knocked up" educational plan, there are other ways to go about it!
I'm sure no one's surprised that I'm anti-abstinence education. But, anyone surprised that I'm pro-choice and think that women who want children ought to be able to choose when they have them, without having the finger of shame pointed by nosey old biddies who think they're the wrong age?
And it's come to my attention that we're getting it for our abstinence education. Well, I'm against one and for the other--
For starters, let's look at the standard "what you do when you grow up" timeline. For a lot of people, it goes like this:
1. Go to school
2. Graduate
3. Get a job and get married, in some order.
4. Once you're married and settled in financially, have kids.
Lots of people want children desperately, and some don't mind the idea and think that it's a pleasant responsibility (i.e. they might personally be happy without children if they can't have any, but they feel that they ought to if they can). I don't think I'm out of line here in saying that many people plan to have children and look forward to it.
Someone who's planning to attend college has a GREAT reason to put off having kids-- they have negative income in college (loans, ya know) and won't have any insurance, plus the huge time sink that college is. Once they're out of college, they'll have a good job with benefits (they hope!) and more income, and putting off the fun of having children until then seems like a really good idea. (Please note that I'm talking here about people who very much want children and who are planning the decision of WHEN to have them, not IF.)
Now, what about someone who's not attending college? They graduate high school, get a job, and maybe get married to someone they like a lot. Is there a REAL benefit to waiting 3-4 years to have their first child? Not really. They're not going to have a huge jump in earnings potential in 3-4 years, and there might be a recession that puts them out of a job entirely.
Is there a REAL benefit to having their first child right then? Yes, there is-- if you aren't going away to school, chances are you're going to be living significantly closer to your parents. Being able to count on your parents for advice, help watching the children, and so on is INVALUABLE. And, well, they aren't getting any younger, so waiting a few years may simply mean that your parents are older and not in as good a shape to help you, or your younger siblings may have kids and suck up some of their time, and so on.
So, looking at the reasons you may want to have children as soon as you finish your education, they apply about equally to college graduates and non-college-attending people. However, the non-college types have one big stigma attached-- they're having children right after high school, which makes them TEEN PARENTS. No, wait, no one gives a shit about the fathers here-- we don't ever see anything about teenaged fathers. This is about TEENAGED MOMS. (Works best to the tune of "Tainted Love," if you're humming along.)
Let's look at the actual numbers. Here in Oklahoma, 65% of our "teen pregnancies" are to women ages 18-19. (Nationally, it's 63%.) By my reckoning and that of the law, those are grownup women who are choosing to become mothers. This is not about children having their innocence stolen, it's about adults, often married ones, choosing to start their family as soon as they've finished their education. The stigma happens because we happen to be less educated than people in "blue states" on the average.
If you are going to attach a stigma to people for not being more educated, it is not fair to attach it only to women who choose to have children when younger. In fact, it's rather sexist. Do we talk about the "teenaged man new car purchasing problem" where young men aged 18-19 buy cars they can barely afford without having any money saved in case they are out of work for a couple of weeks? No, we don't, we focus this on those naughty, naughty "girls" and what they're doing with their uteruses this season!
Now, as far as I'm concerned, there may be some good reasons to track things like this. But let's look at some quotes from "Teen Pregnancy Prevention Facts About Oklahoma 2004" (where I got the above numbers) available here in non-PDF format.
FACT: "Eight to 12 years after birth, a child born to a teen who is
unmarried and has dropped out of high school is 10 times more
likely to be living in poverty than a child born to a mother having
none of these characteristics."
So, let's interpret that. A child whose mother was an unmarried high school dropout at the time they were born, is more likely to live in poverty than a child whose mother was a married high school graduate age 20 and up.
Gee, that's more obvious than words can say. More education = more money. Duh! So, what about comparing children born to teenaged mothers versus born to older mothers of the same educational level? Or comparing teen mothers, some who finished high school and some who didn't? Married versus unmarried? You can't compare two things with three different factors and then say "oh, this is because they're teenagers!" It's NOT because their mums were teens, they're living in poverty because their mothers started off poor!
FACT: (more scary numbers here) "At present, Haskell county has the highest three year average teen birth rate at 104.5 per 1,000 females age 15-19, which
relates to 45 actual births in 2002."
Let's translate that into real numbers. Of the female population aged 15-19, which was 430 girls and women, 45 had a baby. Now let's assume that the same 65% ratio applies here (assumption, I know, but probably not too far off). Twenty-eight of those births were thus to young women aged 18-19, and 17 were to girls aged 15-17.
Now I ask those of you with children, or who want to have children in the near future: How would it make you feel if you and your spouse's joyously planned-for and welcomed child was included as a statistic here, or included as a data point in dozens of fervent lectures across the state about "how not to make the mistake of teen pregnancy"?
For thousands of women across Oklahoma, this is the case. These women are adults, legally able to sign contracts, hold credit cards, drive vehicles, join the military, own or manage businesses, or get married. And yet, despite all these legal trappings of adulthood, we're still stigmatizing their choice to have children?
Now, there are some fairly decent arguments relating to this. I'm sure that teenaged mothers are, as a whole, more likely to get aid from WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a nutrition program) or other sources of aid. Yet I point out that income for a high school graduate doesn't really increase steeply-- you're going to make the same amount of money at 22 that you did at 18, and if you were going to be on an assistance program then you will STILL need that assistance program at 22.
Another argument is that teen mothers are more likely to face spousal abuse than non-teen mothers. Guess what, it's an economics issue again-- non-teen mothers, like other women their age, make more money and can afford counseling or afford to leave. Also, the same thing would happen if we randomly married 100 16-year-olds to their current date and compared them to 100 25-year-olds married to whoever they were currently dating.
FACT: (here's a fun one!) Only 4 in 10 teenaged mothers who become pregnant before finishing high school ever attain their high school diploma. BUT-- fully HALF of teen mothers dropped out of school before becoming pregnant!!
Interpretation: 5 out of 10 teenaged mothers left school for some other reason before ever becoming pregnant. 4 out of 10 returned (or didn't drop out) and got their diploma. Only 1 of 10 dropped out after becoming pregnant and never returned. It sounds to me like the issue isn't about pregnancy keeping them from an education, and we ought to find out what IS keeping them!
Basically, it comes down to this. We're blowing up this "teen pregnancy" issue by taking the REAL problem (say, the 113 girls aged 14 and under who got pregnant in Oklahoma in 2004) and adding in other people to increase the appearance of the problem (say, the 5,084 babies born to 18- and 19-year-old women). This is wrong because it's bad statistics, and it's also wrong because it's using the choices of legal adults to stigmatize them as children who aren't able to make decisions for themselves and who deserve government aid.
And what government aid are we talking about here? "Abstinence education." Which doesn't work, for two reasons:
1. As we've seen, the HUGE MAJORITY of "teen pregnancy" is among legal adults, and this being Oklahoma (hey! #2 divorce rate in the nation) I can promise you that a lot of those are young women in the 18-19 range who have gotten married. "Abstain until marriage" only works if you're not going to bitch about the women who get married and have children!
2. As a Christian, I fully believe that chastity is a religious decision. Chastity, or being chaste, does not mean never having sex-- it's a lifelong decision of having sex only when the time is right. This can include things like:
a) waiting until marriage to have sex
b) not having sex after a divorce until you are remarried
c) not having sex after a divorce unless you reconcile with your ex
d) refraining from sneaking off to masturbate within marriage on the grounds that it takes something away from your partner
e) trying not to fantasize about other people while with your partner
f) trying not to think naughty thoughts about people who aren't available to you
g) doing your best in bed for your partner and having sex as an expression of your marriage vows along with an expression of your hormones
h) using sex to re-kindle romance between you, or re-connect
i) thinking happy thoughts about how hot and wonderful they are, even when you can't be together
And many, many other choices. Chastity is about seeing sexuality as a wonderful, awesome gift from God, and about listening to what you think He wants you to do with it. It's not anti-sex any more than barbecuing is anti-fire-- you just want to keep the fire contained and useful, not all over the lawn endangering people. More to the point, though, chastity is doing what God wants you to do.
What's the point of "abstinence education" which is chastity without God? It's like giving kids crackers and juice because you've heard that people who take Communion are less prone to violence. It's not in the crackers and juice, it's what's in your heart when you do it! (Or, um, for you folks on the pro-transsubstantiation side, it's in the crackers and juice AND your heart.)
Teaching children "not to have sex" without teaching them to feel the joyful promise of chastity is blasphemous, and the sort of arrogant pseudo-Christianity that makes me want to spit at people. You can't lead someone to Christ by dragging them by the naughty bits, folks. If you want to have a multi-faith "let's not get knocked up" educational plan, there are other ways to go about it!
I'm sure no one's surprised that I'm anti-abstinence education. But, anyone surprised that I'm pro-choice and think that women who want children ought to be able to choose when they have them, without having the finger of shame pointed by nosey old biddies who think they're the wrong age?
