Of adult-accountability and growing teen pregnancy rates in Canada

Teen pregnancy is a topic that I tend to try to avoid, mostly because I do know some amazing (at the time were) teen moms. It’s an intensely personal topic and I just want to start this off by saying that this post in no way discredits anything these young mothers have accomplished. This isn’t judging young mothers in any way, or criticising them for doing anything wrong. This post is directly looking at the issue of teen pregnancy from an education/prevention standpoint.

                I was going through media clips at work today and came across this article from the Globe and Mail. In it, the author (Zosia Bielski) is addressing the Canadian trend of increased pregnancy rates in women ages 15-19. The overall tone was basically, girls that go to school and have jobs and are “optimistic about their future” keep busy enough not to get pregnant. I don’t quite buy that at all, because that implies that if a young girl were to get pregnant she has to be unemployed, uneducated and thinks that her future is nothing – which from some of the young mothers I know is definitely NOT the case. One quote did jump out at me, which prompted this post, from Alex McKay, research coordinator with the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.

“People like to narrow in on teen pregnancy as if it’s some sort of specific issue about the sexuality of teenage girls. It is that, in some respects, but it’s also an indicator of much larger and fundamental transformations within a country.” – Alex McKay

                From continuing to read his position in the article I’m confident that he didn’t mean this quote the way that I took it, but it made me think. Teen pregnancy is often looked at as a ‘specific issue about the sexuality of teenage girls’, the entire culture of it is female blaming-centric. You see a young girl who is pregnant and you’re taught that she is doing something wrong, she’s uneducated and she’s stupid – because she is having a baby. The focus is on pregnancy as a woman’s issue, a woman’s problem and a woman’s responsibility to prevent – with very little focus on the male aspect of it. Throwing it out there bluntly, girls don’t reproduce on our own; we do need a little help in that department.

                We teach women to be proactive in their sexual health, which, don’t get me wrong is amazing and needs to continue. We also get it pounded into our heads to not trust the guy to use protection, don’t trust men to look after you’re well-being, and they only want one thing. My thinking is: don’t we have an extremely large gap in education if we’re almost ignoring one gender completely because, ‘they’re just guys’? Girls are taught to not trust the partners they are with at any age, because they can’t possibly have their best reproductive health at heart. I know, from firsthand experience, I’ve been told that given the option to use protection or not, to never trust a man- and that was from a public health nurse! Yes a child grows and develops in a female body, but a man does help put it there! This ‘it’s okay he’s just a guy’ way of thinking just serves to excuse any kind of responsibility. To put in perspective that’s like a farmer planting his…potatoes…in someone’s backyard, but instead of us focusing on the fact he needs to learn where and how to properly plant his potatoes, we say “it’s okay – he’s just a farmer”.

                Sexual health needs to be equal and unbiased. If we are having that large of an issue at the male end of things that we need to tell women never to trust them, then there needs to be a massive increase in education. I think we also need to look at the sexual culture of teenagers as well and open up lines of frank communication. We bash teenagers over the head with “Don’t have sex or you will die”, and then when they do get into a sexual relationship we turn around with, “well they’re just teenagers, what do you expect?” There’s this massive middle part where, honestly, we’re setting teenagers up to get pregnant and then turning it back on not only a women’s issue, but a teenage issue as well. I’ve heard countless adults go on and on about how teenagers need to be more responsible and take accountability for their actions and they’re ruining their lives by being that stupid. I’ve seen the other end of it as well, where students who have never been exposed to sex ever, go to college and make decisions they regret deeply because they were never taught and don’t know how to have a conversation about sex.

                Accountability is a two-way street. Yes, young people need to be accountable for any of their actions, but we also have to accountable for ours. We, as adults, need to be accountable to the fact that our current sex education is not working. We need to be accountable to the fact that open communication about sex isn’t happening with teenagers. We need to be accountable to the fact that teen pregnancy isn’t just a “teen” issue. We need to stop trying to sweep the subject of teen sex and sexuality under the rug because we’re not doing anything but a disservice to teenagers.