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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.....
03/17/2009
Or is it?
I'm talking about the "break-up" of Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol and her "fiancé" Levi Johnston.
Frankly, I was happy to hear that the couple had pulled back from the planned marriage. I've been skeptical about the legitimacy of the engagement from the beginning, thinking it was a political ploy meant to give Palin cover during the Fall election. However, whether phony or real, the engagement was a mistake because a marriage between two immature 18 year olds would not have lasted. Statistics show that in the United States, when a man under the age of 25 marries, there is an 80% chance of the marriage ending in divorce.
Obviously, the pregnancy was a huge embarrassment to Palin's candidacy. Being in favor of abstinence-only education while hiding your teenage daughter's pregnancy was problematic. Bristol was the embodiment of the limitations of abstinence-only education, a staple of the conservative evangelical movement, and Bristol has attested to those limitations herself.
Abstinence-only education does not work these days. (It didn't work in my teen years when two girls out of the 65 seniors in my all girls Catholic High School were pregnant at graduation.) It doesn't work because of a few simple realities.
First, sexual desire begins early, around puberty, which these days is younger and younger. By the time a girl or boy is in middle school, or at the latest high school, opportunities for sexual intimacy along with desire for the same are a reality for most teens. Yet even as teens are physically maturing earlier, we as a society have delayed the realistic age for successful marriage by many years. Some of this is because of a teenager's inability to be financially secure, some involves the need for advanced education to build a successful career, some of it has to do with the psychological immaturity of today's young people.
This leads us to the second reality. In nearly every category other than physical maturity, teenagers are extremely immature because of the complexities of the culture they must master and because of their exposure to messages that influence them to give in to their desires. Teenagers live in a culture that abhors delay of gratification. They know their parents have for years been buying the latest television, new car, new house, new snow machine (sorry, that was a reference to Bristol's father), even if they don't have the money. They are urged every day to purchase clothing with the right labels, and fast food and sugar laden foods that alter their bodies and brains. Saying "no" is something they have been trained by advertisers not to do.
A third reality is that teens see sexuality, sexual messaging, and sexual innuendo everywhere, on television, in clothing products and advertising for those products, in language, in movies, songs and the behavior of everyone from their parents to politicians to Hollywood celebrities. A message of "abstinence-only" contradicts what they see everywhere other than in their church or classroom and this creates cognitive dissonance. The abstinence message is thus watered down and no match for the strong sexual impulses in many immature teens.
Finally, teens lack supervision for many hours of the day. Many other cultures recognize the strength of sexual desire in young people and make sure there are chaperones on hand to limit opportunities for sexual activity. But here in the United States, that is seen as old fashioned. Today's teens have many opportunities to engage in sexual behavior after school, when they spend many hours unsupervised with both parents working, and on the weekends when they are out with their friends. Furthermore, many teens today are given a car when they begin driving, and this offers them the freedom to go where they want, with whomever they want and to do whatever they want.
So we have a longer and longer time period between sexual awakening and marriage, as well as poor supervision, the pervasiveness of sexual messaging, and a culture that discourages delay of gratification. This is a recipe for early and pervasive sexual behavior on the part of teenagers.
The response to this has been divided. One side says we must return to the days when teens were taught to sublimate their sexual desires and refrain from expressing their sexual urges. Mostly, this side encourages an approach to sex education, taught by religions and religious programs, that insist it is God's will that sexuality be reserved for married couples only, and that teens will only benefit in the long run if they say "no" to their sexual urges.
While in theory this makes sense and is an ideal that most all parents agree with, recent surveys show that this approach has not been too successful. Teens immersed in abstinence-only education do delay first sexual intercourse for months, but it is only a delay. Eventually the culture and biology win out and teens engage in sexual behavior which results in pregnancy all too often as these teens have learned nothing about birth control. Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are only the most public example.
The other side recognizes truth in the saying that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." They realize that teenagers are often in the grip of hormonal desire that makes saying "no" in a highly sexualized culture largely impractical. They urge programs that teach teens about birth control, while at the same time instructing them that the only absolute form of birth control is abstinence.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to the problem of teen sexual behavior and teen pregnancy. We have created a mess for ourselves with a culture that is highly sexualized and a population of teens who mature early biologically, but late psychologically. Furthermore, we wish to teach values to our children, and to many those values include postponing sexual intercourse until marriage. However, the person who is able to make it until marriage without engaging in sexual behavior with a partner, when that marriage might not occur until the mid to late twenties, is a rare person indeed. We are talking about ten to fifteen years of celibacy in very immature people. This seems highly unrealistic, no matter how desirable.
My thinking is that we really do need to instruct our young people in how to avoid pregnancy, should they engage in sexual behavior before marriage. It might not be the most idealistic approach, but it is the most practical. Otherwise we compound what starts out as a natural biological urge and typical teenage impulsiveness and rebellion with the possibility of teens either raising another generation of babies as single parents, having an abortion, or saying "I do" for a few years before they say "I don't love you anymore."
During the presidential campaign Barack Obama once said he didn't think teenage girls should be "punished" with a baby. A lot of people took this to mean he was pro-abortion. Actually, he said this in response to some abstinence-only advocates who say that if a teenage girl engages in sex and gets pregnant, that is her punishment from God.
As the mother of four children and the grandmother of three, I could never see a baby as a punishment from God. I think even God would find that kind of talk outrageous. What I don't want to see is a poor helpless baby "punished" with a teenage mom who never wanted to be pregnant, but who got pregnant because she was impulsive and ignorant and did not know how to prevent pregnancy.
We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a complex society where our teens must spend many years learning how to succeed in that society, even as hormones are raging in them and pushing them to reproduce before they are prepared to be parents. This is a situation that has no perfect answer. While we may wish that our teens would postpone sexual behavior until marriage, or at least until they are old enough to manage the potential consequences of such behavior, the reality is that we can't watch them every minute, and many of them are going to give in to their sexual impulses no matter what we tell them. The sexual impulse is far stronger than any parent's voice or minister's lesson plan.
I believe we need much more than abstinence-only sex education for our teens. We need intelligent and compassionate educators who talk about the disastrous consequences of becoming a teen parent. We need wise adults to acknowledge how hard it can be, especially if one has a boyfriend or girlfriend, to refrain from sexual activity, but how much more difficult it will be should a baby be conceived. We need to help our teens mature and behave responsibly. That could mean abstinence or it could mean the use of birth control. Teens should be educated about both, encouraged to aim for the former, but given information about the latter, not just for their sake but for the sake of a child they might otherwise conceive and either find themselves arranging for an abortion or raising a child they are unprepared to raise, both alternatives far worse than preventing that pregnancy in the first place with the use of birth control.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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