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.
