There must be something in the water. Why else would the United States boast the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the western industrialized world?
The most recent statistics I could find - from NationMaster.com - showed that there were 1,671.63 births per 1 million people when it comes to teenage pregnancy in the United States. The next highest nation was Slovakia.
But apparently, this problem has just surfaced in the United Kingdom. The UK news sources, including the London Times, swarmed around a case involving 13-year-old Alfie Patten, a boy who impregnated his 15-year-old girlfriend, Chantelle Steadman, after a crazy night of unprotected sex. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron both commented on the matter and it seems that the rest of Parliament had something to say about it, too.
The couple found out about Steadman's pregnancy when she was 12 weeks along, when they decided to keep the baby.
Patten, when interviewed by The Sun, was asked what he planned to do financially. He simply answered, What's financially?
Okay, am I the only one who finds this entire case absolutely ridiculous? I come from a small town in northern Ohio where teenage pregnancy is frowned upon but is more common than you'd think. I graduated with 67 people, several of whom had already birthed children or were sporting a bump under their gowns.
As a fifth grader, I watched a classmate take pregnancy leave at the age of 12 before birthing her first child when we were sixth graders. The father of her child was in our class, too.
I know that kids today are exposed to much more sex than we were as kids. The censoring of these issues has been lifted quite a bit since I was in junior high. As a 22-year-old college senior, I cannot even imagine, at my age, having and raising a child.
I have thought about it and researched options of how to keep kids from making sexual mistakes at such early ages, but the best thing I can come up with is to strengthen sexual education courses and to offer them to kids at much younger ages. If parents aren't willing to step up and give kids the birds and the bees talk before they hit puberty, then where better for kids to learn than in a classroom with their peers, who will also be hitting puberty momentarily.
Although the legal age of consent in Ohio is 16, girls are starting to menstruate and boys' voices are starting to change way before then. Perhaps it would be beneficial to explain the risks of sex, not just unprotected sex, to these pre-pubescent children. The risk of pregnancy, the risk of STDs and STIs and the emotional and mental problems associated with all of the above. Perhaps scaring the living daylights out of kids will turn them off to sex until they are mature enough to handle all of the consequences associated with intercourse. Or we can keep pretending, as adults, that sex should be a free-for-all and continue to have babies having babies.
4 Opinion
Kadi McDonald
