Happily Ever After
Jan 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 am by Susie
I remember the morning I had to explain to my traumatized kids why Rosie, our hamster, was eating the litter she just had. “When animals breed too young, they’re prone to eating them,” I said. (Which is true what it said in the hamster book I bought at the pet store.)
And as we know, it happens with humans, too. I don’t know how many teens give birth alone and then suffocate their babies, but it’s not infrequent - and it’s happened for hundreds of years.
Not every teenage girl who has a baby kills it, of course. But without a rock-solid support system, enough maturity and a pinch of good luck, odds are high that her offspring will suffer in some significant way. That’s why we don’t encourage kids to have kids.
That’s why I think Ellen Goodman has a good point. Abortion has all but disappeared from the popular culture - and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that teenage girls are highly influenced by what they see. They’re far too prone to romanticizing.
An example: Someone I know was in a Catholic home for unwed mothers and was planning to give her child up for adoption. That is, until the soap opera the girls watched every day featured a story line about a pregnant girl who finally realized she could “never” give up her own flesh and blood! Oddly enough, every girl in the home who watched the show had the same sudden realization. (The nuns, who saw their job as putting those babies in the arms of good Catholic couples, were a little peeved.)
In any event, I’m not saying every teenager who gets pregnant will completely screw up the job of motherhood. But I think it’s fair to say that both mother and child will get less than they should out of life, and that’s why abortion needs to remain an acceptable option. We should do our part by making sure it doesn’t disappear from the public eye like some dirty little secret.
UPDATE: Great minds think alike. Will wrote about this from a different angle.
I do think that abortion should remain a viable option. But at the same time prior to the procedure every option should be covered in detail. In particular adoption should be presented and there should be a system in place to care for both physically and mentally for the mother if she chooses to pursue adoption. This would be for both before and possibly more importantly after the birth. Which is where the current system drops the ball.
Is that why JamieLyn is having the child allegedly fathered by a old man? To provide a story line for “reality” television.
One of the saddest stories that I’ve ever known first hand…
February 1996, the day before I was medivaced off of the (now decommissioned) USS Simon Lake (AS-33), homeported in La Maddellena, Sardinia, Italy, we had gotten some terrible news about one of our young female shipmates.
Apparently, she had somehow been covering up her pregnancy by binding her abdomen, and other methods. I have no idea how she avoided the scrutiny of or care from her fellow female crew members in berthing, but, no one seemed to notice. The day before I left the ship, we received word from our Captain that she had gone into labor, and instead of going to sickbay, or to the Navy’s medical facilities on shore, she had left the ship, walked into the Mediterranean Sea, gave birth alone, cut off the umbilical cord, and drowned the baby.
She was arrested by Italian Authorities for murder. She was 19.
The next morning, I succumbed to an over-exposure to toluene after complaining for over six months about headaches, disorientation, and extreme emotional fluctuations, had a massive seizure on the weather deck, and broke my back in three places.
I have no idea why this young woman concealed her pregnancy, why she killed her baby, or what became of her. I suspect it was a lack of care, and faulty policies that punished Sailors for going to sick call “too often,” from our Ship’s Commanding Officers and Chiefs. I, myself, had been fighting “malingering” charges right up until the day my brain and body decided it had had enough poisoning (all the Docs were able to give me were opiates for the headaches, and the Ship’s Doctor refused to listen to my idea that my daily, nine-hours plus 24 hours every third day of exposure to toluene, was to blame). I DO know that the Captain and the XO were relieved of their duties 60 days after these two incidents.
–mf
I liked Matt Yglesias analysis best - “It would be a message that the whole phenomenon of abortion in the United States is a kind of giant analytical error on the part of American women — tons and tons of them are getting pregnant and having abortions because they think carrying the pregnancy to term would have very bad consequences for their lives, but actually they’re mistaken.” Juno’s Politics 1/2/08 — don’t know how to do links.
My teenage kids thought the movie was very realistic — which is exactly what so scary about it — it’s not realistic at all.
I had a long talk with my 12 year old about abortion and the stigma associated with it.
They have managed to convince even children that it is killing “babies” I had to convince my daughter that the “thing” in you isn’t a baby for quite a while.
They may not have banned abortion but they have succeeded in making people think that a zygote at day 4 is a living breathing infant ready to suckle on a mothers nipple.
More fodder for the war machine.
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I post, as always, as a friend and almost tota supporter. I cannot let the quote above stand. Hamsters do NOT eat their babies because they concieved when they were too young. Eating of the new born among animals is not well understood. Howeve factors that seem to be involved are stress associated with feelings of lack of safety (oddly enough). Some sources report that handling of the baby Hamsters by humans may be a contributing factor as well. I have not seen any sources that report a relationship to the mother being too young. It is not unusual for cats to have litters at age 6 months, by the way.
It is probably true that a higher survival rate and larger litters occur after the first conception.
Gug DVM