Negative ImPact

When I was 17, my mom shipped me off to Minnesota to visit my best friend/ help her celebrate her high school graduation.  It was basically the first time I’d been away from home, on my own and I was a little drunk with my own independence.  Her parting words to me, as she forked over the traveller’s cheques, were “don’t come back with anything pierced”.  I wasn’t a particularly rebellious child, but the fact that I’d been contemplating a belly button piercing before she even uttered those fateful words made it an edict impossible not to ignore.  She didn’t find out about it for about a month, by which time there wasn’t much to say on the subject…and that incident essentially began and ended my teen angst phase.

News broke last Friday about a group of girls who agreed to get pregnant together so that they could raise their kids together…now, four days following the initial story, there is some speculation as to whether this “pact” was a pre-pregnancy promise or a post-finding out fall back plan, but one thing is true about the story – there are 17 girls in Gloucester, MA who are under 18 and pregnant. If this situation was the result of best friends promising to get knocked up together so that they could share the experience of pregnancy and child rearing – from a joint baby shower to cute little houses with white-picket fences next door to each other – then something stinks in the state of Massachusetts.

My story about belly button piercing – the most rebellious thing I did short of rolling my uniform skirt to make it shorter – illustrates just how far we’ve come as a society. Fifteen years ago, teens might have defied their parents with a piercing or a tattoo kept hidden under layers of clothing. Perhaps we’d stay out an hour or two later than curfew. Maybe we’d blow all our saved allowance money on something foolish. These strikes for indepence were all essentially harmless – they hurt only ourselves in the sense that we are now late 20-somethings/ early 30-somethings with cliched piercings and regrettable tattoos.

These Gloucester girls are now moms-to-be…they not old enough to vote and yet they’re bringing new people into this world. I’m sure they’ll all try their best…many of them probably have parents and partners who will help. Maybe their fantasy of bringing up all their babies together will even come true. What I’m also certain of, though, is that they are woefully ill-prepared for the responsibility of having and taking care of a child. They’re relying on men who – if you believe the statistics – won’t outlast the child’s toddler years. If they’re lucky and beat the odds, they’ll scrape together a high school education, which, in this declining economy isn’t going to keep them in Pumas or Seven jeans for long.

I paint a grim picture but it’s based on facts…I’ve worked with this topic for long enough that I know that a teenager who is willfully trying to get pregnant needs an extreme reality check. And for that I have to ask: where the hell are these girls’ parents? Why didn’t they know what their daughters were doing? It freaks me out to imagine these girls getting to a point where they were having sex without protection (WHAT?!?!) and then celebrating learning that they were pregnant. I was fortunate enough to have a mom who treated me like an adult but also set boundaries; it’s a shame that these ladies didn’t have the same.