Javelin: I read about 40 articles on this story before I wrote this, a good portion of them from papers within that vicinity, and that is the way they all referred to Gloucester. In fact, the one word I saw repeated most often was isolated. Also, where did I ever say welfare was to blame? I never even mentioned the word at all. I made mention of other people blaming an economic downturn, but myself, I never blamed welfare at all or implied that any of them were on welfare.
Johnny, you seem to be confusing sex education with contraceptives. I said that handing out condoms and pills would not have helped as their goal was to get pregnant. Some of you seem to think that sex education is about nothing except how not to get pregnant, and it is so much more than that. Like I mentioned earlier, our sex ed program here teaches about everything, not just conception, and including the emotional dangers of having sex before you are ready. They teach about respecting yourself and your body.
The girls are missing something, a basic understanding of playing house vs. really becoming a mother. Like Gloria stated, it is about romanticism and love and the idealism of those things, and the foundation for understanding that a 16 year old is not going to find a fantasy life of unconditional love by having a baby is not present in these girls. The fact that there are (now) 18 of them at once going through this leads one to believe that the entire community is missing something. The complete lack of concern from the one mother I quoted saddened me. Something is very wrong with that thinking.
These girls are treating motherhood as a trend, babies as accessories the way Paris Hilton carries a dog around. They think it will be fun and cool and they had to get that idea from somewhere because I can tell you that my daughter and her teenage friends think no such thing. It’s not a natural teenage urge to become a mother at 16. To look for love, yes. To look for love in a way that causes you to have unprotected sex with a 24 yr old homeless man, NO.
