Having lived in beautiful Gloucester for several years, I was even more interested in the story of the Gloucester girls 16 and younger becoming pregnant so they could raise their babies together.
In Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High, Time magazine said
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Clearly access to contraception will do nothing to prevent young girls who want to become pregnant.
Kay Hymowitz in Gloucester Girls Gone Wild writes
But the story could have one upside: it might expose the folly of much of what has passed for wisdom about teen pregnancy. I say might because so far the media seems to be having trouble grasping what happened in this old, largely Catholic fishing town.
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übersocialized middle-class experts, journalists, and policy makers aren’t addressing the fact that girls tend to like babies. In most cultures in human history, 15- or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need.
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In the past, the problem was held at bay by a combination of sexual reticence, social disapproval, and a no-baby-without-marriage rule, since it wasn’t easy to find a presentable boy ready to sign on to a life sentence at 16. No more. Sexual reticence is now deemed something on the order of a Victorian perversion. Social disapproval? Nowhere evident. The Gloucester school’s superintendent found that most townspeople greeted with a yawn the news that local teen pregnancy rates were soaring,
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Then there’s the point compellingly made by Kathleen Parker in her new book Save the Males: Americans aren’t all that keen on fathers these days. A girl eyeing her cousin’s cute little baby girl used to believe that she had to find a husband before she could have one of her own. Now, she can bypass the husband problem and just spend a little leisure time with the homeless guy on Main Street. Who cares if Dad is an addict or a tramp? They’re all bums—or jerks—anyway
What is so distressing is the poverty-stricken future that lies ahead for these girls and their children. The 'unmarriage' revolution that Kay Hymowitz writes of in her book does more to contribute to the growing inequality in America than anything else.
The increase in single mothers raising children is not just a problem in Gloucester. Intact families with mothers and fathers raising children is the most important element in a sound society with a hopeful future for all. Sadly, it's the least educated girls, thirsting to be loved, who become prey for older, unscrupulous males, seduced into believing that sex equals love.
The battle to point to an alternative way of living -
sexual self-control, resilience against passing temptations, better avenues of communication, a wider range of interests, and, ultimately, the ability to make a complete gift of self to another in marriage -
is being lost when the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have teamed up
in an aggressive campaign over the past several years—a campaign to pressure states to eliminate abstinence education and to reject federal funding for these programs. .... The goal is to get enough states to refuse the federal abstinence-education funding to the point where the ACLU and Planned Parenthood can convince Congress to eliminate such funding entirely.
All this is happening, by the way, as fresh reports arrive almost every month about the benefits of teen abstinence and the effectiveness of abstinence programs.
