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October 24, 2005
The Picture
of the Problem depends on who is taking the picture. For us as
parents, the picture that matters most to us is the family portrait
hanging over the fireplace. We focus our concerns on the circle of
family photographs--in the faces of each of our children and
grandchildren, precious lives we hug each morning, tickle each day,
and tuck into bed each night.
For experts
studying the Problem, our family pictures and our precious
children disappear, buried under an avalanche of statistics. This is
just as much a part of the problem as the problem itself, creating a
divergence in views between experts and parents. We love our
children, but who can love a statistic?
Years ago,
reading about Andrew Carnegie in my seventh grade history book—for the
first time, I realized one person could have millions of dollars in
his own personal bank account. Just imagine it! What would it feel
like to have a million dollars? The numbers were huge--too big for my
young mind.
So it is with
teen pregnancy. The numbers can be simply staggering. Math teachers
labor to impress children with the enormity of a number as large as a
million. One popular lesson has school children working to collect
one million of something: aluminum pop tabs from soda cans or printed
letters on a newspaper page. How far would one million dollar bills
reach? How high would a stack of one million pennies climb?
Thinking of one
million pregnant teens, the mind goes blank. A million? Maybe the
best way to understand the big numbers is to make them smaller. In
truth, the realities of teen pregnancy can best be understood by
looking around us, to the lives of our family and friends.
I remember back
to a friend in my eighth grade class in 1965, a quiet girl who dated a
handsome dark-haired boy. They weren’t the only “couple” of my eighth
grade class. For instance, Debbie was famous for kissing her
boyfriend between classes, and Kathy was the envy of the girls because
she went on a class hayride with heartthrob Bob, a source of school
rumors and gossip for nearly two weeks.
But the quiet
girl and the handsome, dark-haired boy were different. They were
serious. And then one day, the quiet girl was gone. Just like that.
Silently, the ripples of gossip carried the news across the classroom,
“She’s pregnant.” And no one said anything more.
The choices in
1965 were limited. In eighth grade, the quiet girl was too young for
a shotgun marriage. Abortion wasn’t legal, nor did it have social
approval. Although we didn’t discuss it, we all knew common practice
dictated that she had been secreted off to a home for unwed mothers or
to a family out of town where she gave birth to the baby and gave it
up for adoption.
The next time I
heard of a classmate being pregnant, I was a senior in American
History--four years later. A pretty, athletic girl walked
through the desks and up to the front of the room with a withdrawal
slip. Mr. Halbert signed the paper, and she turned to face us on her
walk out of the room. Students moving out of our school always
grabbed attention—there were so few of them who left, and, naturally,
someone in the room had to ask, “Where’s she going?” Again, ever so
quietly, the news passed around the room, “She’s pregnant.”
A short time
later, in May, I graduated from high school with plans to attend
Arizona State University. The birth control bill had just arrived on
college campuses around the country, and I was on hand to witness the
beginning of a quiet revolution.
Now, after 30
years of “controlling birth” with a pill, the best measure of social
change is evident in the lives of the people I know: in my own
family, in the schools where I taught, with the students at my
children’s high school, at church, and in the families of friends and
neighbors. Teen pregnancy is no longer a rare occurrence, something
we hear of every four years or so. We all know of young women and men
who are parents—unwed teen parents.
And when
pregnancy touches the life of a young person we love, there are simply
no statistics to measure the impact on their lives. Statistics are
flat numbers, two dimensional counters that fill up governmental
reports. But they fail to illustrate the more personal significance
of teen pregnancy for our children and for our nation.
When you hug
your child tonight, when you pull the bedcovers under her chin, ask
yourself if teen pregnancy is your only fear about teen sex. If she
gets pregnant, she will become the concern of statisticians. They
ask, “How many?”
But you’re the
parent. And you know the meaning of sex beyond the statistics. Is
that the best the experts have to offer us, a few pills or a patch to
prevent implantation of a fertilized egg? Parents have the heart to
ask, “So what?” And we know that the answer to this question is in
the family photos on the mantel above the fireplace...in the lives
that we cherish, no matter how few.
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One million
printed letters on a newspaper page would cover a bedroom wall eight
feet high and six feet long; one million dollar bills end to end would
reach 96.9 miles; and a stack of one million pennies would climb
nearly one mile up into space, enough for four stacks of pennies as
high as the Empire State Building.
April 11, 2005 -
Why I Teach Abstinence
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