Pregnancy Pact

This is a story that's popped up on the 'net today: 17 girls at Gloucester High School are pregnant and apparently they meant to get pregnant- they had a pact to have babies and raise them together. Plus, one of the fathers is a '24-year-old homeless guy' according to Time.

Well, this is why abstinence only sex education is idiotic beyond belief. The article of course points out that some people are blaming movies like Juno and Knocked Up for 'glamorizing unwed motherhood' but I think that's just the knee-jerk reaction of conservatives who get more mileage out of blaming Hollywood than blaming their own idiotic policies.

To me, sex education is very simple: the bulk of it needs to start at home. Parents need to teach their kids to make the right choices for them- abstinence, safe-sex, whatever. Conservatives tend to have the right idea here- sex education like drinking is going to have to be tackled not by laws and not by teachers, but by shifting cultural attitudes at home. And blindly promoting abstinence while leaving kids in the dark about the basic facts of contraception strikes me as remarkably silly.

I'm not a parent (yet) but I do work with high schoolers. Some of them are smart, grounded and responsible and some of them are stupid, moronic and the furthest thing you could imagine from responsible- and the rest of them fall along the spectrum between those two extremes. Keeping them ignorant about the consequences of sex is probably the stupidest thing I can think of doing: the quickest way to get some of these kids to do something is to tell them not to do it.

I think the answer is a combination: schools can push abstinence until they're blue in the face if they want- but they also have a responsibility to educate kids on the basics of birth control options. Maybe they don't give condoms out in school, maybe they don't pass out numbers of places kids can go to get condoms or birth control pills but they should say, 'hey, dummy this is how you use a condom!'

And parents need to step up and do their part as well. Talk to your kids. Information is power. If you've raised them right, give them the information and trust them to make the right choice. And impress upon them that if they're not prepared to accept the consequences of having sex, then they shouldn't be havin' it!