R. R. Reno over at First Things has some interesting insights into the alleged “pregnancy pact”:
…it seems pretty clear that some teenage girls in Gloucester wanted to get pregnant, talked about it with their friends, and succeeded in conceiving. The school offers free pregnancy testing, and the school nurse reported girls celebrating when the tests came back positive. So, official pact or not, there has been an upsurge in Gloucester of something that our oh-so-inclusive age finds alien and threatening: planned teen pregnancies.
One predictable reaction has focused on sex education, or more accurately the bemoaned lack thereof. If only the students had better information about the real consequences of sexual intercourse! If only the school health clinic were permitted to dispense birth control pills! If only Gloucester didn’t suffer from the repressive mentality of a majority Catholic culture!
Hello. We’re talking about girls who wanted to get pregnant. Is it so difficult to notice that girls who want to get pregnant are not victims of supposedly prudish culture that won’t teach children the truth about sex and give them condoms?
Another reaction is less easily dismissed: It’s not about sex but parenting. If only these girls knew the extraordinary difficulties of raising a child, then they never would have done such a silly thing! So the way to prevent teen pregnancies is to dramatize the challenges of motherhood, especially single motherhood.
Mr. Reno says he has to chuckle about these reactions – especially the suggestion of “if they only knew”, that would have stopped them. My reaction is this – given what we teach our children these girls did absolutely nothing wrong.
Now, as a Christian I can say quite properly that what the girls – and the boys who impregnated them – did was wrong. But our society is, at least in popular culture, entirely post-Christian. These girls violated very basic Christian morality, but what they did is entirely in keeping with the morality prevalent in our public square in 2008. To throw up our hands in horror and ask how this could have happened is akin to a drunk asking how he could have passed out on the floor again: We tell the kids how to have sex; we refuse to tell them not to have sex; we refuse to impart to them Judeo-Christian morality; we do impart to them the concept that “right” and “wrong” are mere social constructs subject to our individual will; we place no moral opprobrium on those who engage in extramarital sex and/or have children out of wedlock – and in conjunction with this we propagandise them massively via books, magazines, music, movies and television that sex is just the coolest thing anyone can do. What is surprising is that many of our youngsters still refuse to be drawn into this sort of thing – not at all surprising that large numbers of them get into it.
People make rational decisions based upon the information they have – we are, after all is said and done, creatures who have reason at our command…the only thing which can be different from one person to another is the sort of information they have to base their decisions upon. Can anyone out there demonsrate that these girls had information which in any way, shape or form would dissuade them from their actions? Only if its Judeo-Christianity…and we don’t know if they had any of it at all or, if they did, how strongly they had been instructed in it vis a vis how strongly they were instructed in the morality of our public square. If this event in any way disturbs you, then there’s only one thing for you to do – insist upon a greater application of Judeo-Christian values.
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