I visit with pregnant women/girls and new moms in my work. I’ve observed an 18 year old, married with a premature baby, who had more maturity and ability to mother her child than some who are twice her age. I’ve seen a teenager give premature birth to a baby who later died. It was the teenager’s mother’s idea that she have a baby because the older woman “wanted another baby in the house”. My experience has been that maturity and age are not necessarily related, that marriage before sexual activity is an ideal well worth pursuing, and that lack of knowledge of sexual matters is very seldom the problem. Girls need mothers and particularly fathers (preferably married to their mothers, but an involved dad is better than none) to demonstrate to them that they are highly valuable, have inner beauty, and are loved enough to be taught what is right and wrong and why. Unfortunately some girls/women think that having a baby is a way to have love or attention (the “look what I caught” mentality). I am appalled that this story seems to present these girls as seeing no need at all for men/fathers for their babies.
