Another pact?

Editor’s Note: I asked our bloggers to respond to this picture, which has elicited new stories of a pregnancy “pact” among high school students. Here’s Nici’s response.

What is it with society (and to get more specific, the media) always looking for someone or something (other than themselves) to blame for the ills of our communities? Teen pregnancy is certainly not a new “thing” and even though we’re in a so called “decline” I do not see an end to this issue in the near (or distant) future. Thanks to Lifetime TV we now have before us so called “pregnancy pacts”. These pacts are to blame for teen pregnancy as we know it today. Never mind again that teen pregnancy has been around as long as the world has been as we know it….

I was 14 years old when I stared at the positive pregnancy test. This was my freshman year of high school in 1995. At that time one of my girlfriends was a couple of months pregnant. It seemed that as soon as I went to school and told my group of friends that I was pregnant more and more of my friends were coming in to. We never entered a pact, never talked about wanting to become pregnant. By the end of that school year there was a group of 10 in my year that were pregnant, 6 of us from the same group of friends and all within months of each other.

How did we all end up pregnant then? We never thought it would happen to us, that was the biggest of them all. We all were intelligent and knew how it happened and how to prevent it…there was also the issue of lack of accessible birth control. My mom had told me that when I was having sex she would take me to get on birth control but I knew better…sure she would take me to get on birth control but she would also berate me and call me every name in the book at the same time. I also was under the assumption that my son’s father and I would spend the rest of our lives together. At 14 I never understood (and who the heck really does) just how long “forever” really is. Nor did I realize that in the years to come I would grow to be such a different person (as would he) and the person that I was at 14 was not who I would be at 16, 20, 25, or 30.

The media sensationalizes everyone and everything. How many of us honestly know the story of a single one of the girls in this photo? Do we know their ages? How they became pregnant? Did they all know each other prior to getting pregnant? Also, why is it that society expects young women who find themselves pregnant as teenagers to hide away at home? Are they supposed to be angry and depressed? No this is not an ideal situation and damn straight they will have hard and difficult times ahead of them raising their children when they’re still growing as well BUT we cannot shame them into seclusion just so we can act like this doesn’t happen. It does and parents (and media) need to do a better job of educating. Abstinence doesn’t work, a comprehensive approach is more likely to work. No longer is it enough to say this is a condom and these are birth control pills and this is how sex happens and how a baby is made and this is how you prevent it. We need to also get into the emotional and psychological aspect of being a young adult and how adding a baby into the mix would affect so many things. I speak to my kids (15, 11, and 9) about sex and protection. They know my stance on sex when they feel that they’re ready and our relationship is such that they already know when that time comes I will be listening to them and will take them to get protection. We have these discussions so often that it is second nature and none of us are at all embarrassed by it. They all know that college is not an option (even if a baby does happen before or during that time) but is just as mandatory as school is for them now. In a nutshell, it is about open and honest dialog between parents and their children. Period.