Teen's Pact to Get Pregnant

Seventeen girls in at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts got pregnant. This is a 400% increase over the normal rate of pregnancies.

It all started last October when the school nurse practitioner noticed a lot of girls coming in for pregnancy tests. She and the head of the clinic immediately went to the school board to insist this "epidemic" of pregnancies meant that the school needed to pass out birth control --- with or without parental permission. The school district said, "No," and the two resigned in protest.

They have to feel pretty silly now to find out they quit over a non-issue.

See, the girls didn't get pregnant by accident, or because they had no access to birth control. They got pregnant because they made a pact to "raise their children together." According to reports most of the babies fathers are over 20, and one of the "dads" is a homeless man they paid to get them pregnant.

Let me explain how this can happen...

Step into the mind of a 14 year old GHS student in June of '07.

It's the end of your freshman year of high school. You just saw the movie Juno about a teenager who gets pregnant. You have completed your sex education unit where you were encouraged to use pills, shots, creams, foams and condoms if you didn't want to get pregnant. Then you were taken over to the school's free on-site daycare center and told by the director, "We're proud to help mothers stay in school."

You discover that one of your role models, Jamie Lynn Spears, is pregnant and going to keep her baby. You and your friends talk all summer about how great it would be to have a baby, baby showers, lots of attention, and how, as long as there was SOMEONE around to help, having a baby would be wonderful.

You already know you don't need the baby's father --- after all didn't Jodie Foster have a baby with no dad? What about Halle Berry? And Jessica Alba? Lots of people are single parents.

If all these women can do it, you reason, then why not us?

I've spent enough time with teens to tell you, that's exactly what went on in their heads.

She can vividly imagine the fuss that will be made over her, the presents and how she will quickly get her figure back --- just like Angelina did.

Command central in a 14 year old's head is the amygdala, the source of her emotions and impulses. The reasoning part of her brain is still under construction so she is not capable of understanding the longterm consequences of her decision. Its not that she's ignoring the data she's been given.

It's that she can't understand it. Literally.

She's not stupid. But data about the hardships of single parenthood, the studies showing teen moms living in poverty and not finishing school, that stuff means nothing to her.

Being a single mom is portrayed as effortless by the media --- and it probably is when you're a celebrity like Jamie Lynn Spears. She has nannies and assistants to ease any inconvenience.

Emotionally, the girls identify with Jamie Lynn and Juno. Not to mention they each imagine the fun of being just like her best friends who will all have babies too.

These girls are not an anomaly...what's happening in Massachusetts is coming to a state near YOU.

There is a well-financed and media-backed movement to get free daycare, birth control and condoms (with or without parental consent) in every U.S. public school. Threatening lawsuits, the ACLU is demanding sex education programs which draw no distinction in risk, fidelity or child-rearing between heterosexuals and homosexuals. They insist our laws require schools to teach that ALL types of family combinations (single-parent, gay/lesbian, blended or cohabiting) produce the same level of security and happiness as traditional families do.

The state of Massachusetts has adopted every single one of these "progressive" recommendations from the "safe sex" coalition. Hmmm.

According the CDC, since 2006, when the ACLU and other advocates began their campaign to eliminate abstinence education from public schools, there has been an increase in the national rate of teen pregnancies for the first time in FOURTEEN YEARS.

Ok, so let's review. The schools (by law) promote multiple partner lifestyles, minimize the inherent dangers of promiscuity, eliminate heterosexual marriage as the ideal, glorify celebrities who think fathers are unnecessary... and then they're "shocked" that teen pregnancies have gone up.

Maybe teenagers aren't the only ones who fail to use the reasoning part of their brain.

What's going on in their heads?

Because the brain reaches adult size by age 6, child development experts have assumed those early years are the most critical. While those years are very important, new information shows us that the brain is actually continuing to develop until much later.

Dr. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes for Health, is the leading authority in the field of brain development using MRI technology. He says “The brain produces way more cells and connections than can possibly survive. There's only so many nutrients, there's only so many growth factors, there's only so much room in the skull… there is a fierce, competitive elimination, in which the brain cells and connections fight it out for survival. Only a small percentage of the cells and connections make it.”

As the child moves through puberty, connections that are frequently used become hard-wired... and the ones which are not wither and die.

Dr. Giedd explains, “Much like Michelangelo's David, you start out with a huge block of granite at the peak at the puberty years. Then the art is created by removing pieces of the granite. [That] is the way the brain also sculpts itself. The advances come from actually taking away and pruning down of [various neural] connections themselves.”

This information should make parents reconsider behavioral factors which will have a negative impact on physical brains structures. For instance,

• Long hours playing video games instead of in social interaction, will have an affect on relational skills.
• Permissive home environments where impulsive behavior is left uncorrected, will impede a young adult's ability to delay gratification.
• Drugs or alcohol killing off or retarding the developing brain cells, will cause the construction of new neural pathways to be more difficult.
• Exposure to pornography strengthens the neural pathways producing dopamine (the hormone that stimulates the pleasure center of the brain), and could result in overly sexualized behavior.

The long-term studies of MRIs show the pre-frontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in planning, long-term consequences and judgment) is not fully developed until about age 25. So, an adolescent’s brain is simply not capable of filtering information as an adult. The connections are not there yet. Understanding these limitations will dramatically impact your relationship with teens.

A real-life example of this would be when Dad tells his teenage daughter, “Don’t get pregnant.” By this he means, “A baby would interrupt school and other wonderful experiences. I want you to have a full rich life and being a struggling teen mom isn’t what I want for my beautiful daughter.”

But what his daughter hears is, “If you do get pregnant, you better have an abortion because I will be disappointed in you.”

Her brain can’t project into the future to grasp the daily hardship of being a teenage mom, so she focuses on the emotions such a statement produces. She isn’t stupid. She's using the part of her brain that IS fully developed.

The most active part of the adolescent brain is the amygdala (the center of impulse and emotions). Facts and figures that a teen cannot “picture” for themselves will remain unprocessed. Basically, it's "in there" but without any meaning or point of reference --- maybe for years until new pathways in the brain develop. Experts recommend concerned adults provide their teens with a wide range of new experiences and opportunities to practice planning, delayed gratification and impulse control.