16 and Pregnant

The movie, Juno, and Britney's sister have put the issue of teenage pregnancy back on the agenda. The biggest buzz happened over the holiday break. Lucky for me, Caitlin Flanagan brought up it again, so it's nice and hot and topical again. Thanks, Caitlin.

Caitlin explains that Juno is a "fairy tale." Most girls aren't able to effortlessly give up their kids for adoption. She points out how unfair it is that girls assume all the blame and responsibility, while the impregnators remain anonymous and continue with their normal lives.

Flanagan writes,

Biology is destiny, and the brutally unfair outcome that adolescent sexuality can produce will never change. Twenty years ago, I taught high school in a town near New Orleans. There was a girls’ bathroom next to my classroom, which was more convenient for me than the faculty one on the other side of campus. In the last stall, carved deeply into the metal box reserved for used sanitary napkins, was the single word “Please.”

That "biology is destiny" line is driving some people crazy.

I haven't seen Juno, so I don't want to comment on its hidden meanings or subplots. I don't give a crap about hipsters anymore. It's a rental.  However, I have been following the Jamie Lynn Spears story, because I'm a shallow reader of tmz.com.

I have been fairly shocked about the level of condemnation that has been heaped on this girl. Yeah, it's rough to be 16 and pregnant, but the press has put the scarlet A on her forehead. Some want her kicked off Nickelodeon. Parents are worried about what they are going to tell their eight year old daughters, who watch Spears's show.

I'm not sure why Flanagan's editorial is irking people. The world still isn't ready for pregnant teens. Pregnant teens still are seen as little sluts who will contaminate the younger girls. And the guys do get off way too easy. It's only the girls that get the cold shoulder, as well as the annoying messy business of being pregnant for nine months.

I would like to see more social supports for pregnant teenagers. High school maternity leave. Colleges with day cares. The boys need to shoulder more of the burden, though I'm not sure how to operationalize that one. I do like the idea that they should have to wear a t-shirt for nine months that says "I'm too stupid to use birth control."

Comments

[Wendy]

Amanda's post at Pandagon was a good one. Her point is that it's the idea that women will ALWAYS be screwed over if they are sexually active outside of marriage that's the problem. I think we all would prefer (and implicit in your post is the idea) that society will change and be less oppressive/judgmental of sexually active young women. Flanagan says that's impossible. That's what we don't like.

Amanda also makes the point that Flanagan acts as though teenage sex = pregnancy therefore either abortion/childbirth, without considering that young women CAN be sexually active without these consequences if they are well-educated about and use birth control.

It's funny--the characters who stay with me are the amazing and perfectly cast JK Simmons and Allison Janney as Juno's parents, and the character who haunts me is Michael Cera's Paulie. I don't know why, either. My husband described him as very passive, letting things happen. But there's a scene where Juno tells him she knows the sex wasn't his idea, and she leaves, as he says to himself "Whose idea was it?" He's not really that willing to give up his own agency, either.

[Amy P]

The funny thing is that the outrage and pointing fingers aren't for 16-year-old girls having sex--they're reserved for the ones who get pregnant and stay pregnant.

I haven't seen Juno yet, but am looking forward to Netflixing it.

Notre Dame seems to have excellent support for parenting students, by the way (there's a whole little housing complex, complete with playground). Georgetown has a couple of nicer housing units reserved for parenting students. Interestingly, one of Feminists for Life's big enterprises is lobbying colleges to provide better support for student mothers.

[laura]

OK, I just watched the movie, because an evil commenter whose initial starts with a W told me where to watch the movie online. Jennifer Gardner made me cry twice. Shows you where I'm coming from. I know more women who desperately want to get pregnant than those who get pregnant accidentally.

But I'm not that far away from the accidental-pregnant-freak-out either. That's why I liked Flanagan's piece. I thought she captured the freak out part very well. I totally didn't get from Flanagan that she was condemning female sexuality entirely. I'll have to reread her editorial.

Yeah, I think that society has to lighten up on pregnant teenagers. I'm actually really militant about that. However, I'm not sure how hopeful I am about things changing any time soon.

[Ailurophile]

I think it was on the Fragile Families website, but somewhere I read a scholarly paper that stated, child support enforcement leads to lower rates of teen and other unintended pregnancy. Men who know they will be on the hook for 18 years are much more motivated to not get their partners pregnant than those who know they will get off scott-free. It really does take two to tango.

[jen]

What I've heard from the friends who work at Planned Parenthood is that it's norplant that's really changed teen pregnancy rates.

I was stunned to see that Flanagan had written the piece; I uniformly hate everything she writes ... yet this op-ed did not offend me. In my experience, she's right that teen pregnancy robs the teenager of their girlhood. And she does not drop into the baby-killing verbiage that's often used in these conversations. Instead she's just saying, hey, this is no picnic. You don't just walk away from it.

I also read the Pandagon thread. And I found myself wondering, how many of these militant commentators have ever been pregnant? Do they know what it's like to make that decision and live with it?

[Wendy]

L, bwahaha.

Amy, I'm pretty sure there would be outrage and pointing fingers if abortions weren't private. The thing is: pregnancy *shows*. Abortion doesn't. I wonder what would happen if every a- or b-list actress who'd had an abortion came out and said so, and said how old they were.

This actually raises an issue about privacy, I guess. Abortion allows a woman to keep her sexual activity private, but childbirth does not.

Btw, Laura, you know me. I got pregnant accidentally with #2.

[Wendy]

Sorry, I have more--#2 was hanging on my arm while I was typing, distracting me.

My mom has been volunteering at a thrift store run by Birthright, but Birthright is closing it. Why? Because the counseling part of it (there was a counseling office in the back--I had to go in there once to change my son, and it really is like you'd imagine, all videos and models of fetuses) is just not seeing enough people to justify keeping it open.

I consider that good news.

I also think that Juno wasn't a fairy tale for the character of Juno. I don't think she got off scot-free. She was definitely affected by the experience. It wasn't shown as incredibly easy for her.

I also think there is a bit of a message that biology is *not* destiny with regard to parenting. I loved that scene with Jennifer Garner and Allison Janney at the end, moms with no biological connection to the children they mother. Of course, I am also just a big old Allison Janney fangirl.

[bj]

I had the same reaction as Jen at being surprised by that I didn't hate the article (when I saw it was written by Flanagan). Because, it rung true, to my personal experience. I've found becoming a mother the most life-altering of any experience that I've had. So, the idea that a woman could birth a child and then go on to live a life that doesn't involve that child is a fairytale to me.

But then, I realized that we can't build policy around what "rings true" to my own personal experience, and that asserting that a woman couldn't walk away from a birth unscathed psychologically unscathed is not my decision to make. And, it is wrong to make the equation sex == pregnancy. It simply doesn't, as Wendy says, with appropriate precautionary measures, sex << pregnancy. Then, the person has to decide for themselves how harmed they will be by an accidental pregnancy (followed by birth, miscarriage, or abortion).

[Amy P]

I volunteered for a while at a Birthright office near a university (probably 2000-2001). The walk-in clientele was mostly college-age African-American girls coming in for free pregnancy tests. Birthright started in 1968 and has a really admirable philosophy: "It is the right of every woman to give birth and the right of every child to be born." Volunteers were also told not to participate in demonstrations, protests, etc. My fellow volunteers were mostly Catholic college girls, including a rather liberal friend and a number of very sweet nursing students. The woman running the office was nice, but only part-time, distracted by family responsibilities, and technophobic (as was the larger organization). She was also reluctant to hand out supplies from the baby supply closet--what if we needed them later? I felt like there were a lot of good people involved with that office, but it seemed disorganized, so I didn't feel comfortable contributing financially. Later on, our office went on a fieldtrip to the local Mom's House, and I was quite impressed with the homelike environment and the level of organization there. It was a big old house with live-in staff, home to a bunch of girls and women in all stages of pregnancy and up until probably three months post-partum. Mom's House gave women a place to live and free babysitting for their infants while they were in school. (It must have been a very expensive operation to run.) From visiting websites, it looks like other Mom's Houses provide free childcare to older children. A young relative of of mine by marriage in Washington state with a social work degree worked at a similar house with some sort of Catholic affiliation, but with what sounded like a rougher clientele. It was a really, really demanding job. Her clients wanted to give their infants coffee, etc. I suspect that there's a lot of value in this sort of residential set-up, since there's a lot to learn, and three months is about how long it takes to settle into a routine with an infant.

[Jody]

For a satisfying rebuttal of Juno's adoption politics ("kicking it old school" pretty much devastated at least two women of my mother's acquaintance), you could read Shannon at Peter's Cross Station:

http://tinyurl.com/2shsj5

[laura]

I don't much about adoption, so I can't comment on whether or not girls can give up the kids for adoption easily and happily. It probably depends on the girl.

The scene where she breaks the news to her parents was completely fake. No yelling or shouting?! I don't know any parents who would take it so well.

[Wendy]

Jody, thanks for the link. What interested me particularly about it (other than how it showed a perspective I was totally unfamiliar with) was how the writer kept wanting certain things to happen to Juno, and when they didn't, she felt really disappointed.

Is Juno just a cipher onto which viewers and characters are projecting their own ideas/hopes/etc? (That's what Mark does--he sees this hipster music-loving girl and sees her as living exactly the life he wants.)

[jen]

I keep waiting for the movie that shows the two alternate lives of the same young woman.

There's the "Knocked Up" half where she ends up tied for life to the guy with the cute butt from Comparative Lit. He may or may not walk out on her, but for sure she's broke and for sure she's forever altered.

Then there's the half where she freaks out, quickly realizes her family does not love her enough to support her in this horrible situation, bonds forever with the girlfriend who actually goes to the abortion clinic with her, and finishes college. Maybe throw in a couple of therapy scenes for good measure. That's the reality of it. I'm not sure why this is such a scary thing for so much of the world!

[Amy P]

Jen,

How about ten years down the road the woman in your second scenario discovers that no matter how many needles she sticks in her rear end, how many miscarriages she has, how many tens of thousands of dollars of infertility treatment she puts on credit cards, she still can't get and stay pregnant?

[Amy P]

By the way, who of us, confronted with a pregnant teenage daughter would tell her "You're on your own, kid"?

[Emily P.]

Plenty of people who've had abortions go on to live fabulous lives, full of love, happiness and children. Some don't, but many do. I'm sure they are changed by the experience, but there are many hard things we all have to face that alter us throughout life. Dealing with difficult, even heartbreaking, decisions is ultimately a pretty normal part of life.

[D]

Amy P, are you under the impression that there's an epidemic of mid-twenties infertility?

[Amy P]

D,

No, but one might abort in one's teens or early twenties and then find that one can't conceive after one has finished a BA, done graduate school, established a career, married, etc. Fertility is highest in precisely those years when middle-class American women do not welcome pregnancy, and definitely starting to decline around the time that many upper-middle class women finally get around to trying to conceive. 35 is an important date, but I think I've heard that 27 is an important turning point, too.

[Amy P]

I've chopped out a couple of paragraphs:

Study speeds up biological clocks
Fertility rates dip after women hit 27
Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

In the latest warning for women hoping to delay childbirth, European researchers report today that fertility already starts to wane in women starting about age 27.

Previous studies have suggested most healthy women could be reasonably sure of being capable of conceiving up to about age 30 or 35, when egg quality starts to dramatically decline. Men typically experience a much later and more gradual drop-off in fertility.

Experts said the new findings, appearing today in the journal Human Reproduction, underscore the significance of age-related fertility problems. They also noted that reproductive biologists are only beginning to pinpoint the causes and possible solutions.

"Fertility is a lot more fragile than you might imagine," said Dr. Felicia Stewart, a gynecologist at the University of California at San Francisco.

There were 433 pregnancies during the study period. Statistical analysis showed women in the 27-29 age group had significantly less chance on average of becoming pregnant than did the 19- to 26-year-olds. Pregnancy rates did not change notably between the 27-29 age group and the 30-34 age group, but dropped sharply for women over 35.

[Amy P]

Sorry, that was from the San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com).

[jen]

Amy, teen pregnancy and infertility are two separate things. They are not related to one another, although they might happen to the same person. I personally find it offensive to imply that infertility -- or the specter of infertility -- lessens the burden of teenage pregnancy.

I think what we all need to get used to is the fact that something like 40% of American women have had an abortion, even though no one talks about it. You know that mom at the playground with the two kids? Odds are pretty good she's had an abortion. And if you think anyone but her girlfriends were cool about it when it happened, you are mostly wrong.

[Amy P]

40% sounds really unlikely to me for American women. Where are you getting that number?

[bj]

Jen's stat comes from published anaalyses:

"by the time they are 45, and at 1992 rates, 43% of women will have had an abortion."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9494812

The full text of the study is available if you follow the link.

[D]

Sure, but that's totally orthogonal to the issue of aborting a teen pregnancy -- people with all backgrounds wait too long to try and have children as adults. I've never seen evidence showing that women who had abortions as teens wait longer to attempt wanted pregnancies.

[Wendy]

Also, 60% of abortions are to women who have one or more children already. 3/4 of women who have abortions cite their responsibility to others as a reason for their abortion.

This is a class issue. The stereotype of the young ambitious woman who has an abortion for the good of her burgeoning career is perhaps overstated.

[Amy P]

Haven't abortion rates dropped quite a bit since 1992? That was 15 years ago.

[Suze]

Yes, abortion rates declined steadily between 1990 and 2002 according to the CDC but at the same time restrictions on abortions rose in many states and the number of providers declined. In 2003 a study found that 87% of the counties in the US did not have a single abortion provider—lack of access is likely a factor in the drop.

Waiting til you are in your thirties or forties to try for a wanted pregnancy and not being able to conceive is an entirely separate issue from terminating a pregnancy when you are a teenager, and the two shouldn’t be conflated. I haven’t seen evidence that legal abortion itself jeopardizes future fertility. Infection can result in infertility, of course, and these infections typically occur when the abortion is done under unsafe conditions, as when women seek illegal abortions because the procedure is unavailable to them for some reason (before Roe v Wade, when the woman hasn’t been able to secure an abortion before the cutoff in her state, or when the woman is a minor who can’t get necessary parental consent).

[Suze]

I saw Juno a few weeks ago and was slightly uncomfortable with the way some things were handled. It was pretty cavalier about the decision process for both abortion and adoption, and yeah, even in the coolest of households, such an announcement by the teenage daughter would result in a lot more screaming. But it was a COMEDY, that genre in which reality is set aside in pursuit of the laugh, so I didn’t berate the film’s light tone too much.

Flanagan’s piece did irk me. She made a fair point that it is the woman who bears the vastly greater burden when sex results in pregnancy but her conclusions were offensive: that’s just biology and there’s nothing to be done but lock up the girls for their own good. The bit about Victorians’ “deep commitment to girls” made me seethe, and made her appear woefully ignorant. The physical discomforts and pain of pregnancy and childbirth may be current biological realities, but we as a society have created the unfair social and financial burdens placed on young women who become pregnant. We’ve made them the gatekeepers of sexuality, the ones whose failure it is when the couple is having sex. We actually cheer the boys who have sex. There’s slut and there’s stud. When pregnancy results, the guy is all too often let completely off the hook (and is sometimes applauded) in terms of social, financial, and legal consequences. But that’s a fact of culture, not of biology, and culture can change, it should change. It’s unconscionable to say that we should limit girls “enfranchisement” to spare them the burden of the deck we’ve stacked against them.

[Amy P]

"We actually cheer the boys who have sex. There’s slut and there’s stud."

Not universally. I'm going to be pointing out (early and often) to my son that randomly having sex when you are too young to be a parent eventually means either a) the girl has an abortion or b) you bleed financially for the next 18 years, have to explain the situation to all future romantic interests, and wind up with a kid who you didn't want, don't know, and who will grow up saying "I never knew my dad."

There seems to be such a real epidemic of promising young women (Britney, Lindsey Lohan, etc.) screwing up their lives in public and wrecking their careers. I loved Mean Girls when it first came out--I just don't think I could watch it again, knowing how Lohan has been throwing away her life.

[Amy P]

Now that I think of it, given enough time, both a and b would apply.

[laura]

Yeah, I agree that there are solutions to the problem of the unfair distribution of responsibility for pregnancy. However, we can't discount biology all together. Biology is a factor, because no matter what penalties we heap on the boys, it's still the girls who have to either have the abortion or be pregnant for nine months.

But that doesn't mean that boys should be left off the hook, like they are now. The slut/stud labels have to change. I imagine that there are other political reforms that can be made also. I think we need to look more closely at cultural and political reforms rather than looking wistfully back on the past for solutions.

[Laura GP]

The message our culture tends to send to boys is that their role if they father a child out of wedlock is, at most, to cough up the cash the law requires them to. Amy, I hope what you'll actually teach your son is that if he fathers an unexpected child, at whatever age, he'll be responsible not just for financial support but for stepping up and helping to parent the kid.

Laura, thanks for enabling an interesting conversation. I loved the movie, though I thought it was pretty unrealistic. I found myself uncharacteristically nodding my head in agreement at Flanagan's comments about the social and emotional issues facing girls who get pregnant. But then, Amanda's post at Pandagon points out so well that those issues, even the emotional ones that are very real, result from all sorts of social conditioning. Juno's a fairytale, but the kind we should be telling our kids more often.

[Kai Jones]

Laura (and others): when I was 16 and got pregnant, my mom didn't scream or shout. She just heaved a sigh, and asked what I wanted to do about it.

She'd had an unplanned pregnancy at 16, back in the 1950s. Her mother *made* her get an abortion. (It was that or get kicked out of the house with no support.) When she got pregnant again, at age 20, she had to give the baby up for adoption. Less than a year later, she had me--and finally she had the support to raise a baby.

Not all parents react with screams. Because they're not all so narcissistic as to think it's about them.

[Amy P]

"Amy, I hope what you'll actually teach your son is that if he fathers an unexpected child, at whatever age, he'll be responsible not just for financial support but for stepping up and helping to parent the kid."

Barring serious misbehavior on the mother's part, a young man doesn't get to parent a child if the child's mother doesn't want him to. I'm going to explain that little fact of life, too.

[Amy P]

The mental monologue that should be occasionally going through an 18-year-old guy's head is: "Wow, what a cute girl. I wonder what it would be like to have her hauling me in and out of family court for 18 years?"

I need to start saving suitable newspaper clippings and whiny male web-postings today.

[laura]

Oh my, Amy. You are painting a picture of a girl who withholds access to her kid and who uses the courts to milk cash out of the poor boy. I don't put too much stock in whiny web stories from thwarted dads. I'm sure that they exist, but I doubt they represent the majority of accidental dads. If a girl is hauling a guy into court, my guess is that he isn't parting with his money voluntarily. Most girls would love to help raising the child, so that they can finish school or get a job.

I don't want my kids to become accidental dads, because raising kids is a lot of responsibility, and I would expect them to do their share in that department.

[Laura GP]

Amy, even in the (I suspect relatively rare) cases where single mothers don't welcome parenting assistance from the father, my experience is that court proceedings involving paternity findings and support orders also provide an opportunity to handle custody and visitation. The presumption in the state where I live is for joint custody, and I think it's very rare for fathers to be denied requested periods of placement with him (that's what's colloquially referred to as "visitation"). Joint custody, even if the kids spend most of their time with mom, means the father is entitled to obtain medical records, communicate with the kids' schools, attend parent/teacher conferences, etc., in addition to the time he actually spends with the kids. The law (nor, in my experience, the real-world application of the law) does not permit mothers to unilaterally keep fathers away from their kids.

[bj]

I *think* that what Amy is trying to say is that she's trying to figure out forceful ways of showing her boys the practical consequences of unwanted pregnancy (with the understanding that any girl who has seen a pregnant woman waddle down the street knows something of the practical consequences of a pregnancy).

Mind you, my advice on consequences for my daughters would look very different if I considered abortion an unacceptable option. In my world view, abortion is unpleasant but not life altering. Birthing a child, though, would have been life altering for me. (Though, I say this as a what if, never having had to face the consequence of an unwanted pregnancy, only the fears of one).

[bj]

Interestingly, the availability of abortion as an option doesn't change the advice for my sons, since they wouldn't get to decide whether an unwanted pregnancy would be terminated. So, unlike the pregnant daughter, who will only birth a child if she chooses to, the son might become a father with no choice in the matter. Something to remember when I give advice to my sons!

[jen]

I also find myself wondering about how I would react to this happening to my daughter. Like BJ, I would be advising for abortion. I can't even imagine how things would end if my daughter had a child at a very young age and then cared for it in a way I considered unacceptable.

Speaking of movies that deal with teen pregnancy, has anyone else seen "Quinceañera"? Now there's a movie that really tells it like it is with teen pregnancy. Girl gets pregnant; boy denies it's his; friends smirk and then disappear; family kicks her out; she is so broke she can't afford maternity clothes. I really enjoyed it, although once again it was too afraid to consider the abortion alternative.

It was Knocked Up that really pissed me off with regard to its pussy-footing about abortion. How could a person in that character's situation not at least talk about it?

[bj]

"Like BJ, I would be advising for abortion.", but I do regard it as the woman's decision, right, even if it's my own daughter making the decision?

I do find it difficult to contemplate the option where a child exists, and isn't being properly cared for. But, really, once the child (the grandchild) exists (outside someone else's body), they become a person of their own, to whom I would feel (I think) equal responsibility as to my own daughter. So, I guess, as with the sons (who can become fathers against their will), we could become grandparents against our will. And, as a grandparent, I would do what I could for the child: their personhood isn't changed by the fact that they were unintended).

(the legality of abortion doesn't make it a requirement for anyone, and once a child exists, they have the same right as any child, to their father, their grandparent, and to society's resources).

[Suze]

No, not everybody cheers boys who have sex. I’m not claiming it’s a universal reaction, only that the cultural attitude is pervasive, pervasive enough that our language reflects it (along with the different standard for girls). And I congratulate you, Amy P and others, who teach thoughtful behavior to all your children, boys and girls.

For too many young men, though, the response to “a” (the girl has an abortion) is “So?” It doesn’t affect them directly; they might have to drive to a clinic or help pay, but they’re not the ones undergoing the procedure, as Laura and others point out. This isn’t the boys’ fault, of course, but “the girl might have to have an abortion” is not a powerful deterrent for many young men.

As for “b,” not necessarily; it depends very much on where you live and what your resources are and what you’re willing to do to get a judgment and try to have it enforced. My niece became pregnant a year and a half ago, when she was a senior in high school. On his parents’ advice, the father of the baby basically denied even knowing her (the parents had been through the same thing six months earlier with their older son). My niece decided not to even sue to establish paternity. They lived in a small town, and she wasn’t interested in what she knew would come her way were she to push it. And it’s doubtful, given their state (Alabama), that she would have seen any money anyway. She grew up watching her mother, my sister, pursue every means she could (state agencies, advocacy groups, private detectives) to get child support out of her first husband, with no good result. My niece’s own father has judgments against him in the hundreds of thousands, after not paying child support for his two daughters since 1990. If you are willing to leave the state and to move around a bit when the heat gets high, you can avoid paying anything.

[Amy P]

bj's basically right--I was trying to come up with a motivational speech for dealing with hormonal adolescent males who don't think that pregnancy has anything to do with them. (My son is 2 right now, so this is fortunately just an intellectual exercise at the moment. I have years to get that Powerpoint presentation together.)

Later today, I was thinking of a female version of the mental monologue I suggested earlier: "Wow, what a cute guy. I wonder if he will be steadily employed for the next 19 years, pay child support regularly, take the kid for occasional fun outings, and remember our kid's birthday and Christmas?"

As Laura points out, the first dialogue was for a worst case scenario, but I think it's worthwhile to teach kids the habit of thinking what would be the worst thing to happen if they did X, Y, or Z. That's a skill that doesn't come naturally to 90% of adolescents. Suze's child-support stories are instructive. I'm a big fan of hard luck radio (AKA the Dave Ramsey show), and there seems to be a non-zero number of fathers who react to child support judgments by going off the grid. That has the added bonus of not having to pay taxes, which is very attractive to this special kind of person. Aside from genuine coldhearted deadbeats, there's a number of men for whom child support payments are a very big deal, even though from the point of the mother, they are a pittance. For marginal men like that, 18 years of child support is crushing. (Divorced women go through a lot of bankruptcies, but divorced men also have a high bankruptcy rate, at least from what I remember of "The Two Income Trap.") It's been very interesting to me to overhear men complaining about women, child support, etc. on the internet. It seems to me that those whiner guys talk about their unwanted born children the same way that some pro-choice women talk about unwanted pregnancies, and indeed some people are starting to explicitly make the comparison (it's appealing to some libertarians, for instance). Some of this is probably pure opportunism and manipulation, but the raw emotion does seem pretty similar: "I'm trapped! I never wanted a baby! This isn't fair! Why do I have to suffer! Why does a little bit of fun have to wreck my whole life?"

[ALB]

I like the idea of the "I'm too stupid to wear birth control" t-shirt, but I really think it should be worn over a fake belly that increases in weight over the course of the 9 months.

[Wendy]

I'm not sure I would equate sexuality to "a little bit of fun." It's a primal human need. It can be controlled, of course, but it's not just a bit of fun.

Should I give up sex because I don't want another child and because birth control isn't 100%? (Answer: no.)

[Amy P]

OK, how about "Why should a primal human need wreck my life?"

[WendyW]

Yeah, I've often thought that my love of chocolate ice cream was ruining my life.

If only I preferred vanilla....

[Amy P]

"Should I give up sex because I don't want another child and because birth control isn't 100%? (Answer: no.)"

What do you say to a young man who agrees with you: he wants to have sex even though birth control isn't 100%, and he regards it as a gross imposition on him that he is asked to pay child support? He would be more than happy to chip in for an abortion (which is after all safer and cheaper), but he thinks it grossly unfair that he is being legally required to financially support a child he didn't ask for. What do we tell him?

[WendyW]

Amy, actually, I offer that question as a debate topic for my students every time I teach persuasive writing. :)

[Amy P]

Interesting! So what do they say? (And how could you have kept back this potentially crucial data?) I will metaphorically make up a cup of Celestial Seasonings and wait to hear what you have to say. (It's not a real cup, since I'm parked with toddler on the floor in his room while he's playing with trains.)