To the editor:
When I heard about the "teen pregnancy pact" at Gloucester High School and the international news frenzy it sparked, my first instinct wasn't to be ashamed of my adopted hometown..
After reading the onslaught of moral condemnation and outright hatefulness which has formed the bulk of the responses from Gloucester's high and mighty citizenry, however, I'm not so sure..
This is an odd and unusual situation. Teenage motherhood is obviously not something to be taken on casually, and 18 high school girls choosing to become pregnant concurrently is an uncommon and noteworthy occasion.
But is there really cause for this level of hue and cry, moral outrage and wholesale condemnation of the girls (and boys) involved? Of course not, yet the city's editorial pages and online bulletin boards are dripping with scorn.
As I read some of the venom directed at these girls, that's when I cringe in shame over our society. That's when my mind harkens back to the Salem witch trials. That's when I see what a powerfully negative force mob mentality can be.
That's when I see that whatever choices these girls may have made for themselves, their chances of success are all but annihilated by the overwhelmingly condemning reactions of local society..
We are forgetting a couple of key things in this story — and this is bound to be an unpopular view, but it needs saying:
Even teenage girls have civil liberties. Even teenage girls have certain rights over their bodies and their reproductive systems. Even teenage girls have the right to make uncommon and challenging choices..
It is not for you and me to jump to the knee-jerk conclusion that all these girls are stupid and uninformed; that they and their offspring are doomed because of their radical choice. Even so, most of Gloucester evidently sees nothing wrong with engaging in a hate fest directed at these young women, as if driven by a collective wish to enforce a self-fulfilling prophecy of utter failure for every pregnant high school girl, regardless of her individual circumstances..
Much of the media have rushed to hang these young women. Instead of taking a rational, pragmatic approach, as in: "OK, here's an unusual and challenging situation. What can we do to make the best of this?", the media and the public have brought out the pitchforks and mounted their collective high horse, preferring to ignore the fact that teenage motherhood is in fact feasible, has in fact. been undertaken successfully by millions (billions?) of women throughout human history and can, under the best of circumstances, be rewarding and fulfilling.— if, by necessity, immensely challenging — for both parent and child..
I am not trying to paint a picture of teenage motherhood as something to be encouraged in modern society. As the recent media storm succinctly illustrates, we are ill-equipped to deal with the notion..
I am a firm believer in sex education, open and free information about human sexuality, reproduction, contraception and the value of making informed, autonomous choices regarding one's own body. These are measures which have been solidly proven to greatly reduce teen pregnancy rates in all societies in which they are meaningfully practiced..
"Abstinence education," .by the way, is prima facie nonsensical. Teenagers will always engage in sex; society's only measure of control over which being whether they tend to do so aided by informed decision-making or else in blind ignorance of the facts of life..
At any rate, I wish to extend an overdue "congratulations" to all these pregnant girls — a common, decent word of well-wishing and good will usually extended to expectant moms, but of which these young mothers-to-be have been woefully deprived due to their age, circumstance and society's general thirst for scorn and self-righteous indignation in place of much needed support and guidance.
"It takes a village,". the saying goes. Godspeed!
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INGE BERGE
Broadway, Gloucester
