Thoughts on Alaska and Teen Pregnancy

The controversy over Sarah Palin, the mother who has it all, and her daughter Bristol's pregnancy has left the Democratic Left in a state of paralysis. The paralysis is caused by the inability to frame the debate in terms that allow for people to come together rather than take sides with raised fists over the abortion debate. The issue of abortion has long been a dead horse. Those who remember the world before Roe v. Wade, and before the State of New York legalized abortion, remember a world where abortion was common, though illegal. The debate then was over whether abortions should be done by physicians in medically safe environments, or in unsafe, unhygenic places by potentially incompetent souls armed with coat hangers and iodine. Nobody wants to return to that world.

But the world we live in today has another scourge. The debate should be about teen pregnancy and what we can, and should do about it. Sociologist and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified teen pregnancy as a major issue forty years ago. Moynihan recognized the connection between single parent families, which teens with children most often are, and welfare dependency. Since that time very little has been done to address, or deter teen pregnancy. The abortion issue has been manipulated by a propaganda machine on the right. That same machine has ignored teen pregnancy as an issue.

Our crisis in health care policy, similarly has not addressed this issue. The children of children are born to parents who do not have health coverage. We now know that early years are critical to child development. We know that kids who grow up in stressful environments are more likely to have problems that lead to criminal behavior. The dropping urban crime rates of this decade and the last have been attribute to the drop in urban teen pregnancy after Roe v. Wade. Crime rates in rural areas have risen, and it is those same areas that the Republican propaganda machine has exploited. You can't blame a meth factory on the Washington Elite.

The children of children are born to father's who are full of testosterone, and noticeably missing the maturity necessary for the job of being a parent. Those teen fathers, like the father of Bristol's fetus, are more likely to want to kick someone's ass than they are to wipe a baby's bottom and change a diaper. Those fathers often have conflict with the mothers of their children. While most of us have a few different partners between the ages of 16 and 25, when you add kids by each of those partners you are creating a mess. Teen pregnancy effectively interferes with education. How many teen parents finish high school? How many teen parents earn a college degree? There is a child left behind when a child gives birth to a child.

No one has effectively documented the number of teen parents who eventually get charged with abusing or neglecting their children. The experience of lawyers and social workers who work in this field is that there is a strong linkage between being a teen parent and being a neglectful or abusive parent at some point. The impact of a teen pregnancy lingers. When a 24 year old is coming into their own adult world, with an education, a full time job, an apartment, a car and a life; the teen parent is preparing to send a child to kindergarten, or primary school. All of the learning experiences of early adult hood are lost or skewed by teen pregnancy.

If the Republican Party endorses teen pregnancy, and this week's show says they do, then they need to be challenged to meet the needs of teens who get pregnant.

Nothing in the Republican policy of the last 28 years has done that. The Republican policy has been to abort an effective nation health care policy, while soliciting donations from health insurance companies and for profit hospitals. The Republican policy has been toward higher education has been benign neglect. Republican tax policy has sucked money out of the working middle class, so much money that neither the grand parents, or the teen parents have enough money to adequately care for their children, and it is the Republican Party that surrendered in the War on Poverty.

What we must do to make our country truly great again is make it a country where every Bristol Palin can be guaranteed an education, can be guaranteed that both she and her child will have health care, can be guaranteed to have a decent life, whether they are rich or poor, born to the parents in power, or parents who only posssess the power of love.


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for more information see
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_ATSRH.html
http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/vital_statistics/2006/table30.htm