No it ain’t us. However, I wanted to repost this op-ed from USA Today that I found intriguing:
For Christian conservatives, the pregnancy, at 16, of Nickelodeon actress Jamie Lynn Spears – the wholesome star of Zoey 101 and younger sister of troubled singer Britney Spears – poses a good news-bad news dilemma.
Lopeynote: #1: Why is even bad news “good news”? Why can’t something just be WRONG, for crying out loud?
“We should commend girls like Jamie Lynn Spears for making a courageous decision to have the baby,” summed up Bill Maier, vice president of the conservative ministry Focus on the Family. “On the other hand, there’s nothing glamorous or fun about being an unwed teen mother.”
Lopeynote: Unless, of course, your last name is Spears, you have an acting career, and you can afford to make mistakes.
No one would argue with that sentiment. For teens of lesser means, pregnancy takes away much more than fun and glamour. It greatly reduces chances that the young mother will ever escape poverty.
For all the agreement about the problem, however, a failure to recognize facts appears to be interfering with finding solutions. The Bush administration is sticking adamantly to abstinence-only sex education, which was adopted at the urging of religious conservatives, even as evidence mounts that such programs are failing.
Lopeynote: Emphasis and bolding mine. This is nothing new. Do not let facts get in the way of your agenda.
The teen birth rate, which declined 34% from 1991 to 2005, increased 3% in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s too soon to say whether this is a blip or a trend, but at the grassroots level, states and school districts appear to be turning away from abstinence-only, presumably because of poor results. The Washington Post reported this month that 14 states had notified the federal government they would no longer be seeking money for abstinence-only programs.
Lopeynote: Admittedly, this is a poor presumption. It could be that such funding is tied to other stipulations having nothing to do with birth control. However, 14 states is almost 30%.
Plenty of studies show that the best approach is a combination of sex education and abstinence counseling. And this year, an eight-year, government-funded study by the non-partisan Mathematica Policy Research Inc. concluded that there was no evidence abstinence-only programs reduced teen sexual activity. Yet the administration is in denial.
Lopeynote: Telling someone no, especially teenagers for whom boundary stretching is already a de rigeur part of turning into adults, doesn’t work, especially since sex, unlike drugs and alcohol, requires nothing illegal (like a fake ID or buying illegal drugs).
Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General from 2002 to 2006, has revealed that he was pressured to emphasize abstinence and ignore facts about sex education. Congress’ non-partisan Government Accountability Office has found that most abstinence programs are not reviewed in a scientifically acceptable manner.
The price of such willful ignorance is high. Eleven percent of all births in the USA, about 750,000 a year, are to teens – higher than in any industrialized country, according to a 2006 report from the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates birth control. Eight in 10 of these pregnancies are unintended.
Lopeynote: The numbers astound me on several fronts. The fact that 2 of 10 teen pregnancies are intended is also somewhat disturbing, but the sheer volume of kids having kids means that we’re going to have Grandparents and even Great-Grandparents (who will probably be only 60 if the pattern holds) taking care of newborns.
With any luck, Spears’ Zoey 101 devotees won’t follow her example, nor will teens find less reason for caution in the current comedy Juno, in which a teenager has a baby with positive outcomes in the end.
Jamie Lynn says that her pregnancy surprised her and that, in retrospect, she and her boyfriend should have waited. Familiar words from pregnant teens. If more girls were taught all their options in Sex 101, those words might be heard less often.
Lopeynote: O RLY?
I also shook my head at the fact that the girl who played Mary in “The Nativity Story” this year is also pregnant.
No word on who the father is …
And I should point out that there are more people than you or I run into who don’t go to college, get married right out of high school and start their families early. That’s not all that unusual. The lady living downstairs from me might fall into that category, but she’s not married anymore.
So – beverage?
CS
*claps*