Even if this whole affair is made-up, the fact that Gloucester High School does in fact have a run of underage girls getting pregnant supports the contention that, in microcosm, the nation has a problem.
My concern – my FIRST concern – is always, always the children born into these circumstances. People who think that this is o.k., that they’ll muddle through and no harm will be done, need to read some of the outstanding work of the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller. Poor, neglectful, ignorant, abusive parenting is responsible for a whole host of disorders and wasted lives. If a girl is getting pregnant because she wants a baby to love her is completely out of touch with any concept of what it means to be a parent AND WHAT CHILDREN NEED. It is directly attributable to her own harmful childhood that she is in this predicament of unrealistic expectations and feckless, stupid decisions. In fact, I would say that this narcissistic need to be mirrored in the infant child will be there beyond adolescence. Such a person needs depth psychotherapy to work through her own narcissistic wounds. Unfortunately, narcissists are people who have no concept of an inner life and are not people likely to enter therapy. It is a vicious cycle that just tragically repeats on into future generations.
Those libs who have dropped in on this topic and made flip comments about our consternation about this phenomenon are shockingly ignorant of the consequences which spin out from these events. I’m not trying to be the moralist here, but there certainly are moral dimensions to this, however much they may be denied or mocked. I’m not primarily condemning the girls. People do indeed make mistakes and fail to meet reasonable moral standards. I’m not casting stones. I’m just pointing out that certain behavior is wrong BECAUSE THERE ARE WELL FOUNDED REASONS FOR CONSIDERING IT DISORDERED. It may not be hip or cool or with it. I do not care. I’m trying to point out that things more often go wrong in these situations than work out for the better. Check in on the lives of these babies a couple of decades down the road and tell yourselves those convenient lies.
