Girls and "The Pill"Thirteen-year-olds come to school very pregnant. What do you do? Do you lock up their "lovers" — and their parents, too, if you can find them — and send the eighth-graders to a home for wayward girls? Or do you start prescribing birth-control pills to children? Some choice. Health clinics at middle schools in Seattle and Baltimore already prescribe contraceptives. A proposal to do the same in Portland, Maine, has set off angry protest spilling into the talk shows. This is one of those controversies that throw culture, poverty, religion, conservatism, liberalism, sex and children into one unsavory stew. Most every responsible adult agrees on this: The idea of girls 14, 13 or younger having sex lives is ghastly. So the brawl isn't over whether there's a bad problem, but the proper response. One can talk about the girls' "moral" failings — but that won't do a lot of good. Many of the pregnant young teens are themselves products of chaotic single-mother households, where the parent entertains or takes in a steady stream of boyfriends. In such environments, sex seems no big deal. But the anti-pill contingent does have a point. Helping girls obtain birth control could to some degree "normalize" sexual activity for kids in the single-digit grades. Girls will observe a classmate "putting out" for the coolest boy in school. If the school nurse helps their friend get birth control pills in furtherance of that activity, how bad could it be? On the other hand, single motherhood is a catastrophe in high school, much less middle school. Placing these girls on the express train to lifelong poverty seems especially tragic at such young ages. The King Middle School, in Portland, reports that relatively few female students engage in sex. But seven of them showed up pregnant in the last academic year, which is why the school wants its health clinic to prescribe birth control.
Other than ignoring the problem, the alternative is expensive and contentious: — Pull the girls out of the school and put them in a special place where they will be taught, cared for and kept out of the dysfunctional homes they probably came from. — Go after the so-called guardians. When parents overlook their young teens' having sex, social workers investigate — tolerating such situations constitutes parental neglect, at the very least. Caseworkers can consider extenuating circumstances, but a parent who knowingly lets a 13-year-old daughter become someone's sex partner should be in trouble with the law. — Identify "the father." If he's a grownup, send him to jail for a long, long time. If he's another kid, make it clear he or his parents owe child support for the next 18 years. I'm not unsympathetic to this disciplinarian approach. But it would require expensive programs that conservatives don't want to pay for. And removing children from parents, however lousy, tends to arouse controversy. Given these realities, the careful dispensing of birth control pills seems more of a reasonable alternative. After all, schools that prescribe birth control are not endorsing sex for young teens. They're just trying to help certain girls survive to an age where they can make mature decisions about sex and family. This problem clearly can't be by solved by lectures about sexual morality. The disgrace of a pregnancy without marriage — the old "fate worse than death" — is not much of a deterrent for many of these girls. The goal must be to protect children from awful upbringings and sexual predators. There are no easy answers here, are there? To find out more about Froma Harrop, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2007 THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
