They aren’t oblivious, they just don’t care. This article sums it up in the last line: “The only point at which teen pregnancy becomes a practical or moral problem is if you try to prevent it.”

Of course in school sex education classs, we were taught that absitinence was the best form of birth control, but that’s a rant for another day.

I don’t want to give the impression that I blame the pill for my own pregancy, oh no. You see, I wasn’t on the pill. I was an idiot, and was having completely unprotected sex. Sometimes I’d kind-of try to maybe know where I was in my rhythm, but obviously didn’t put enough effort into even that. Don’t follow my example.

My wake-up call to the ineffectiveness of the birth control pill was not through my own experience, but through the other girls in my high school that were pregnant at the same time as I. I think altogether there were about six girls in my school of under 400 students that were pregnant along with me. The school administration would bring us together for group presentations by public health nurses or the guidance counscellors. It was like a school club, except we didn’t get a spot in the yearbook.

At some point while we were waiting for a presentation to start, we all shared the stories about how our joyful little mistakes were made. Mine was the only story that differed from the others; all the other pregnant girls in my school were on the pill when they became pregnant.

Weird, huh? For something that promises 99% effectiveness, it seemed that my town must have been delivered a bad batch of pills! Except that wasn’t the case. See, the pill is only 99% effective in a perfectly controlled labratory setting. In real life, you can forget a pill. In real life people have periods of vomiting or diarrhea (which can decrease the effectiveness of the pill). In real life people take other medicines that can interact with the birth control pill. I’m sure it was some combination of these reasons that left six girls, from a very small school to begin with, all pregnant despite their attempts to have sex responsibly.

I learned from my own mistakes, and the mistakes of those six girls. Personally, I’m a big proponent of the birth control needle. One shot in the hip every three months and I’m impregnable; it doesn’t get much simpler than that.

In her latest post, she makes the point that “there is no commitment greater than having a child…and it should never, ever, ever be taken lightly.” I agree, I soooo agree, I do.

There is just the teeny-tiniest point that we diverge on: commitment to the father.

The second you get knocked up, you have made a lifelong commitment to a man. Part of being a responsible parent is taking care to choose the right father. When parents fail to make a joint commitment to each other and their children…society suffers from their irresponsibility.

I know she’s not talking to me, but I can’t help but feel that in a way she’s talking about me.

I’m sorry VA, but the moment I got knocked up I had no commitments to anyone but myself. When I chose to keep the baby yes, I had a commitment to myself and to my baby and the father. But when I told the father about my choice, and he told me I should have an abortion, that’s when the triad of commitment between the father, myself, and my baby ceased to exist.

I think a better statement would be more like “THE SECOND YOU DEMAND CHILD SUPPORT, YOU HAVE MADE AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR COMMITMENT TO A MAN.” Can we agree on that?

If part of being a responsible parent is taking care to choose the right father, maybe another part is choosing to go on without the wrong father. I think if more women were faced with that choice; the choice to raise the child completely on their own, we’d have less bastard children. The few bastard children that were born would be born to commited mothers who made a very hard and important decision.

I don’t know why, in the twenty-first century, we cling to these Victorian-era mentalities.

Let me talk about my sex-ed experience. I had what I consider to be a pretty “cool” sex-ed teacher. She put up with all of the classes’ typical middle-school giggles and managed to teach us all about our reproductive systems, puberty, and even a bit of stuff about diseases and safe sex. Of course, the “abstinence is the only 100% safe option” mantra was repeated countless times.

The thing is, and something that this article from Time touches on very briefly, is that sex ed only deals with the clinical side of sex, and not the emotional. There was no talk about pain or pleasure, nothing about the very real urge to procreate we were about to experience, and nothing suggesting that we *gasp* almost certainly would have more than one sexual partner in our lifetimes.

The closest the classroom instructions got to the emotional was that sex was an act only for someone who was mature, and you should save sex for someone you love.

So there I was, probably like countless other girls, with a head full of curiosity, a fascination with the forbidden, and burning desire in my pants. Oh but sex is for someone I love, and I have to be mature…*bing!!*

That’s when the teenage brain makes up any logic necessary to permit the sex act.

“well, I do love this person”

“I am pretty mature for my age”

Forget the influence of the media or peer pressure, a teenager can come up with a reason to have sex all on their own.

To the people still trying to push abstinence-only sex ed: save your breath. Trying to teach kids to wait until marriage is like trying to teach a fish to breath air. It’s just not natural.

Oh, and if you don’t just want to take my word for it here is a 164-page scientific evaluation on the effectiveness of $87-million-annually Abstinence Education Program in the US. Here’s a taste: “Program and control group youth were equally likely to have remained abstinent.”

Big surprise.

When the subject of my young motherhood comes up in conversation; people always seem a bit in awe about it. At least, I think it’s awe. I can understand that people think it’s interesting, and I understand when people say “oh that must have been hard”. I guess that it’s just hard for me to see it that way myself, probably because I’m too close to my own situation to appreciate it.

I mean, I know I’m different than my peers. A few times that’s been painfully obvious. I guess I just haven’t thought that it was an interesting different. More like, “Oh, you’re allergic to cotton? That must be hard.”

More than just interesting stories though, I feel that I have a unique perspective on a lot of controversial topics. I have opinions and beliefs that come from my experience with teen pregnancy that I don’t seem to share even with other young moms. I thought if I wrote about my feelings on some subjects I’d just be repeating what a hundred other girls before me have said, but when I went looking I found that there are no other girls, or they aren’t saying anything.

Anyway, I’m not actually going to write anything interesting in this post, I just wanted to get some thoughts out about what’s coming soon and about why I thought it was finally time to write about it.