Teen Pregnancy - What is wrong with parents today?
Why do they have to put disturbing news on the news?
I was listening to the snippets on the radio today. In a nearby city a 16 year old boy is going away for a long time. He and his girlfriend devised a plan for him to beat her in the stomach with a baseball bat daily over the course of 2 weeks to force a miscarriage. A nearly 6 month old fetus was born at her home at the end of the 2 weeks. They didn't say whether or not it survived. I think they left death as a given. I felt like vomiting.
How scared must those kids have been of their parents to do something so phenominally stupid and horrible? What is wrong with parents today that they would be so distanced from their children that the kids would do something like this, not only to another human being, thier very own child, but to themselves and their families. That boy's life is ruined. All because they felt they couldn't go to their parents when the scariest thing that had ever happened in their lives happened to them.
Why do we preach absitenence when we know it doesn't do the trick? Why do we protest abortion clinics, but not do what we can to make adoptions less difficult and costly? When you mention teen pregnancy, why is the first thing that pops into your head a girl dropping out of school, grandparents raising the baby while mom parties and lives on welfare for the rest of her life contributing to the problem with subsequent children?
I know that I was so terrified of getting pregnant before I was ready, and being forced to make a decision I NEVER wanted to make, that I abstained for a LONG time. I had a plan for my life (of course it was totally different than it turned out, but that's beside the point:) ). I wanted to be a mother more than I've ever wanted to do anything else in my life, since I was about 4 yrs old, but I couldn't have a baby too soon, before I was ready to give it more than I had had in life.
I also knew that I could NEVER give away that thing I wanted more than anything in life. If I'd had to love my baby for 9 months and then hand him to someone else never to know of him again I honestly would have probably committed suicide. And while I fully support a woman's right to choose, I could never have chosen abortion and lived with myself. So I did what I needed to do to avoid that decision. (Unfortunately, 99.9% of young people are not so far thinking.)
However, if adoptions were more open... If loving mothers were given the opportunity to be a part of that baby's life, see it, love it, be the friend of the family that visits and brings gifts, maybe it would be different. If children were not stigmatized and ostracized, if they were accepted by their families and society, even though they'd made a mistake, maybe it would different. If girls were valued more highly in any society, and the value of a human life was not reduced to next to nothing (if you want to take it, anyway. $10,000+ if you want to save it through adoption), maybe we wouldn't have teenagers leaving babies in garbage bags on the side of the road or killing them with baseball bats.
Oh, all my tears for a utopian world free from the suffering that wrenches my heart daily...
I was listening to the snippets on the radio today. In a nearby city a 16 year old boy is going away for a long time. He and his girlfriend devised a plan for him to beat her in the stomach with a baseball bat daily over the course of 2 weeks to force a miscarriage. A nearly 6 month old fetus was born at her home at the end of the 2 weeks. They didn't say whether or not it survived. I think they left death as a given. I felt like vomiting.
How scared must those kids have been of their parents to do something so phenominally stupid and horrible? What is wrong with parents today that they would be so distanced from their children that the kids would do something like this, not only to another human being, thier very own child, but to themselves and their families. That boy's life is ruined. All because they felt they couldn't go to their parents when the scariest thing that had ever happened in their lives happened to them.
Why do we preach absitenence when we know it doesn't do the trick? Why do we protest abortion clinics, but not do what we can to make adoptions less difficult and costly? When you mention teen pregnancy, why is the first thing that pops into your head a girl dropping out of school, grandparents raising the baby while mom parties and lives on welfare for the rest of her life contributing to the problem with subsequent children?
I know that I was so terrified of getting pregnant before I was ready, and being forced to make a decision I NEVER wanted to make, that I abstained for a LONG time. I had a plan for my life (of course it was totally different than it turned out, but that's beside the point:) ). I wanted to be a mother more than I've ever wanted to do anything else in my life, since I was about 4 yrs old, but I couldn't have a baby too soon, before I was ready to give it more than I had had in life.
I also knew that I could NEVER give away that thing I wanted more than anything in life. If I'd had to love my baby for 9 months and then hand him to someone else never to know of him again I honestly would have probably committed suicide. And while I fully support a woman's right to choose, I could never have chosen abortion and lived with myself. So I did what I needed to do to avoid that decision. (Unfortunately, 99.9% of young people are not so far thinking.)
However, if adoptions were more open... If loving mothers were given the opportunity to be a part of that baby's life, see it, love it, be the friend of the family that visits and brings gifts, maybe it would be different. If children were not stigmatized and ostracized, if they were accepted by their families and society, even though they'd made a mistake, maybe it would different. If girls were valued more highly in any society, and the value of a human life was not reduced to next to nothing (if you want to take it, anyway. $10,000+ if you want to save it through adoption), maybe we wouldn't have teenagers leaving babies in garbage bags on the side of the road or killing them with baseball bats.
Oh, all my tears for a utopian world free from the suffering that wrenches my heart daily...
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