Driving the teen pregnancy rate down

   In all the ferocious debate about how to teach kids about sex, with driving the teenage pregnancy rate being the goal of all sides, it's forgotten often that girls who get pregnant in high school often do so with that goal in mind.  All the condoms and/or save it for marriage education in the world isn't going to get through to girls who have it in their heads that they need to be having a baby now.  With that in mind, an interesting post from Avery Tooley, and a right on target quote:

People who can't see the future get caught up in the present.  The pregnancy rates among girls who had solid plans for the future were significantly lower, as was the age of first intercourse.  Obviously, anybody who's active can get pregnant, and sometimes it happens to the girls who have the most to lose, but more often than not,  the girls who are already struggling to see tomorrow wind up with babies today.  I think lack of vision is clearly the culprit here, because not only do the girls fail to see the benefits of forestalling their activity, they fail to see the consequences of having a baby.

   The pregnancy rate has been on a steady decline for decades, and a lot of that is attributable to better education and birth control methods.  But what we neglect is that the teenage pregnancy rate has been going down at the same time there has been a full-on press to teach girls that they have a life ahead of them that is about more than marriage/motherhood.  I went to high school in a small West Texas town where there was a lot of poverty and a huge amount of the students sat around bored, frustrated with having to go to high school when they had a good reason to think education wouldn't translate into a more exciting life or better career.  Girls in particular had nothing to look forward to.  The thinking on waiting to have babies was that it was pointless to wait.  What are you waiting for, after all? 
   Not that all the girls had this mindset by any stretch.  I joke that I grew up in 1957, but the truth is that despite heavy resistance to Title IX, much of the attitude behind it had leaked in.  There was plenty of support to be had if you joined athletics or academic extracurricular activities.  And while the number of girls being seriously prepared for college should have been higher, those who were on the college track were expected to do well and take pride in themselves.  Even for us dumb high school kids, it was easy to notice that girls who the community invested in didn't get pregnant (or if they did, you didn't find out).  I'm fairly certain that the Golden Kids, as I jokingly called the ones who were in college-track classes and extracurricular activities who the teachers all talked about, had sex as much as the more invisible kids.  Golden Kids just had a future that a baby would interfere with.
   The solution to the problem is right under our noses--quit treating some girls like they're nobodies and they might quit having babies to prove that they're somebody to someone.

Via P6.