Hilary Mantel, a celebrated British author who won the coveted Man Booker Prize, is childless – the result of an illness in her twenties that left her unable to have children. But the Sydney Morning Herald reported this weekend that Mantel says she was perfectly ready to take on motherhood at fourteen.

”Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society’s timetable,” Mantel is quoted as saying.

After just last week debating whether teen pregnancy has been given star status with MTV’s attempt to expose its realities, Mantel’s comments are proof that even adults can be caught up in the romanticism of “having a baby.”

She references her own ability at fourteen to “set up house,” but there’s a marked difference between the knowledge of what it takes to do the laundry and the grocery shopping and the fiscal ability to back it up. This isn’t some mysoginistic method to hold women back from meeting their emotional goals.

It’s reality. At fourteen you can’t get a job that will pay you enough money to support a child. Period. You can’t “set up house” without the fiscal means to set one up.

This is setting aside the fact that most girls aren’t as mature as Mantel insists she was at fourteen. One viewing of 16 and Pregnant will show you that – in the last episode few episodes, the girls couldn’t even stomach burping their own kids, not to mention their solid belief that they should still be allowed to go out each night while their babies stayed at home with grandma. Mantel may have been old for her years. Most kids aren’t.

Nor should they have to be. Pushing pregnancy on girls to fight the male timeline does nothing more than push women back out of the workplace, back out of universities and back into the kitchen. If we have to risk our daughters hitting their twenties and facing infertility, for the sake of female kind, I think it’s a risk I’m willing to take over putting my daughter back into the fifties.

Hilary Mantel might wish in hindsight that she was barefoot and pregnant, but I wouldn’t wish that on my daughter. Would you?

Image: MTV

A nice pat way to explain how teens end up pregnant. Except it isn’t true.

A new study proves that the myth of the poor girl getting knocked up because she doesn’t have a strong male role model at home and mum is off working two jobs to make ends meet is just that – a myth.

A US body, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found 67% of Americans believe pregnant teens come from homes below the poverty line. Seventy per cent, they say, believe the teen girls are from single-parent households.

But a look at more than 14,000 kids in grades seven to twelve revealed that four out of every 10 teenage parents (including the fathers) lived in a home with both biological parents. An additional 19% of those kids lived with one biological parent and one step-parent, putting the number of teenage parents living in a two-parent household at more than 50%.

Only 28% of the teen parents lived in a home below the federal poverty line, and more than 40% lived in homes where the income level was at or above the poverty line.

Image: daquella manera

In addition to attending weekly meetings, the girls ages twelve to eighteen in the College-Bound Sisters are given a stipend of $US1 a day to keep their legs closed.

The girls can’t blow their cash at the mall, however. True to its name, the program is designed to get these kids into college, and that means their money is put straight into an interest-bearing account. They can collect when they’re eighteen (provided there are no buns in the oven) to spend the money on tuition.

The success rate so far is close to one hundred percent – meaning almost one hundred percent of the girls stayed baby free AND graduated from college. Not bad considering North Carolina has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, and the state’s board of education considers its graduation rates a serious problem.

Although paying kids to keep their noses clean harkens awfully close to bribery and does not exactly instill a lot of confidence in their abilities to do it alone, drastic times (or statistics – like those above) call for drastic measures. And the emphasis toward putting this money into a college education – something families need help with anyway – makes this idea infinitely more palatable.

What do you think Babble readers?

Image: KERO

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A mum in Texas says her daughter’s school crossed a line when they forced the girl to reveal her pregnancy to staff, then sent her for medical testing and counselling.

Considering it’s a Christian school, it’s not surprising the First Choice Pregnancy Center, where they sent the teen, just so happens to be one of those abstinence-only, pro-life organisations. But then the Trinity Christian School allegedly expelled the girl in May of 2008, two weeks shy of the end of school.

The girl’s mum is suing the school, church and specific staffers at the school. But it sounds like her biggest problems are with the centre, which the lawsuit says, “The pregnancy center interviewed, counseled and tested Jane Doe
without the consent or knowledge of her mother and disseminated her private medical information to [school Bible teacher Shannan] Morgan and [school counselor Brad] Watson without consent or authorisation.”

So there was a violation here on behalf of the centre. Her health info should not have been given to school staff based on federal guidelines regarding the privacy of health information. Period.

It’s inappropriate too that the school ordered any form of medical testing, and that the girl was forced to reveal her pregnancy. Again, that’s private health information. Her pregnancy was not swine flu. It was not going to affect public health. It’s where the school clearly crossed a line. As they did by kicking out a student for her pregnancy.

But is the counselling part out of line? Even counseling at a place where they make it their mission “to give women and teens in crisis pregnancies and opportunity to examine their lives, think through their options, and gain vital information regarding positive alternatives to pregnancy termination”?

Remember, this isn’t a public school. As a religious private school, the separation of church and state is null and void. So while parents with kids in public school could (should) throw up their arms for having their kid brought to a faith-based counseling service, that doesn’t necessarily apply here. And counseling of some form is often put into place by school districts, some of which have a psychologist on staff for kids to consult. And that can be at the suggestion of a teacher or simply a student’s own request. If a student or teacher dies, a trauma team full of counselors is called upon, and parents are not asked if that’s OK.

I’d imagine counselling for a pregnant teen is appropriate. Even in a public school setting – although there I’d again call for something non-faith based, with no particular focus on whether or not she’ll keep the baby.

What do you think, parents?

Image: supernannyrules.com (not the girl described)

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It's one of the worries that comes with parenting a girl; as sexist as that may be. Parents worry about their daughters getting pregnant. They worry about their sons crashing a car. And the failure earlier this month of California's (oft over-looked of late) Prop 4 ballot measure that would have required doctors to contact a teen's parents before providing her with an abortion, pointed to more parents' admission that their kids' futures are out of their hands once the sperm hits the egg. 

But it doesn't mean parents are making it any easier on their kids. In the Detroit case, the girl initially told police she'd discovered the newborn when a cat pulled at a trash bag in the garbage near her home. She later admitted she was afraid of her mother's reaction to the truth – and with good reason. The mother is facing assault charges after allegedly beating the girl for concealing her pregnancy. The girl and her baby are in the hands of protective services.

Her daughter's future really is out of her hands now. Or maybe it was before the girl got pregnant? Because teens are going to have sex, and unfortunately, on occasion, that sex will lead to pregnancy. But the parent whose kid is that scared of telling her parents that she's got a baby on the way probably hasn't had a frank discussion about much with Mom and Dad in recent years. It seems like a mum who reacts to a daughter's dilemma with her fists is setting herself up to be disappointed somewhere down the line. 

Image: Amazon

Damn that Carrie. All that cavorting around she and Samantha did on Sex and The City may have had an unexpected effect on teenagers – pregnancy.

A new study has claimed that teenage girls who watch a lot of TV shows with a high sexual content are twice as likely to become pregnant, while boys watching similar shows are also much more likely to impregnate someone.

The study warned that shows such as SATC and Friends “glamourise sex while hardly mentioning its downsides, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”

Lead researcher Dr Anita Chandra said: “Sexual content on television has doubled in the last few years, especially during the period of our research. We found a strong association.”

Other experts said parents and schools must share the blame.

Psychologist David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, said only about 19 per cent of U.S. teenagers say they can talk openly with a trusted adult about sex.

With many schools not offering sex education, that left the media to act as a sex educator. Dr Walsh said: “If you have a kid who no-one’s talking to about sex, and who then watches sitcoms on TV where sex is presented as “this is what cool people do”, the outcome is obvious.”

I guess the outtake for parents is to talk to their kids about sex long before they become teenagers, be willing to talk about sex and contraception and for goodness sake, ban the TV from their bedrooms!

[Source]

US educators are hoping the national discussion about the pregnancy of the daughter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Bristol, will renew the scrutiny of Federal Government-backed abstinence-until-marriage sex education programs. Sex educators have found the programs ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and the US now holds the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, with one in three American girls falling pregnant before the age of 20.

Palin opposes any sex education in schools that does not take the abstinence approach, and opposes abortion in all circumstances except where the mother’s life is in danger.

Republican conservatives have applauded Bristol Palin for opting to carry her baby to full term. But Logan Levkoff, a sexuality educator, told music video network MTV she should not be lauded.

“We shouldn’t hold this girl up on a pedestal because of the mistake she made and then the decision she made afterwards,” Dr Levkoff said. “Whether or not she keeps this baby, teen pregnancy isn’t a good thing.”

In comparison, Australia has the sixth-highest rate of teen pregnancies in the OECD, but numbers are dropping.

My view? It’s pretty hard to stop hormonal teenagers from having sex. At least if they know about contraception, they can avoid falling pregnant and picking up HIV.

[Source]

Sarah Palin will possibly be our vice president and her policy on teen sex is abstinence, which is no policy. Condoms, diaphragms and birth control pills are not the devil’s work. To not educate your kids to practice safe sex is to encourage them to have unsafe sex. That is not a message I want our second highest governing official passing to my kids.

This is the same ideological turd our current government took into the African AIDS crisis, suggesting Africans could cure their AIDS plague with some good old fashioned abstinence training. Not condoms or other safe sex devices, just sweet chaste abstinence. Thank goodness we finally sent Africans some rubbers or else we wouldn’t be seeing a drop in the numbers of newly infected.

But what about our children’s precious minds? If we talk frankly to them about sex and even provide them with protection they will become ruined people, sexual deviants of the highest order. They’ll transform into beings so brutally, nastily sexualized that their actions will make unicorns cry, right? Well listening to the radio the other day, I heard the words of a Republican delegate praising the Palin’s composure during this delicate time for their daughter. The woman said, “I think the situation with her daughter just makes her one of us. She’s got problems like any mum: you tell your kids what to do, but kids will do what they do.” Um, thank you. Kids will do what they do and if you want to stick your head into the sand that is “abstinence only” training, then you won’t be able to see your kids running around having unprotected sex. Persistent ignorance is not good child rearing. I am not saying it is travesty that some 17-year-old got knocked up. What is a travesty is a 17-year-old running around having unprotected sex, in which there are far greater dangers than pregnancy looming, just because mummy and daddy believe teaching smart responsible sex is like offering your kid an apple from the tree of knowledge. It’s a slap in the face of human nature and responsible parenting. Please someone tell me just one instance, any instance, in which choosing to be ignorant saved the day.

Teaching abstinence is fine, if it’s a piece of the puzzle, not the only option. There must be some abstinence only proponents out there. Tell me I’m wrong. Please explain to me how abstinence only works, show me the numbers. Show me how being honest and open with your kids ruins them, because I need to know I am not just shouting into a void. So what do YOU think???