Pregnant Teens and Unwed Mommies: Another rant.

 I'm coming up with so many rants I should just make a whole new page dedicated to ranting.


I did the most horrible thing one can do in the 21st century to another person: I unfriended them on facebook.

It was over a status message he posted. I can't copypasta anymore since I did remove the dolt as soon as I read his post, but paraphrased, it went something like "Why do kids get pregnant younger and younger nowadays? Is TEET really that great? Boys are having TEET!"

I know half of the post didn't make sense, but I didn't like what it was implying, so instead of hiding him from my feed, I unfriended him. It wasn't a major loss since the person was really a work-related acquaintance rather than an actual friend. And if he was ranting about the ails of immoral under-aged coupling, maybe he wasn't such a valuable work-related resource for my lucrative career as a pornographer. Kidding.

I can't call myself a teen anymore, so why the reaction?

I have to admit, I used to think teenage pregnancy was the worst thing that could ever happen to someone in this day and age. This is even while knowing that in the old days, if you were unencumbered by familial responsibility by 23, you were considered an old maid. I also didn't date in high school. I'd blame dad's very successful "You're my princess, nobody deserves you except royalty" campaign that he ran for most of my childhood. The first question I asked fortune tellers throughout college was if I was going to get pregnant early, which didn't make sense considering I did not have a sex life (or just a life for that matter) whatsoever. It's like pregnancy was this mysterious disease that affected youngsters and HAD to be cured. The fact that you had to have sex to become pregnant made it even worse - it meant sex was shameful and any girl who did it was an easy slut who deserved the misfortune of pregnancy.

And then, after actually taking the plunge at 23 and actually getting knocked up myself, I find that first hand experience really does help put things in perspective:

1.) Pregnancy isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. In fact, contributing to the cycle of life might be one of the best things that CAN happen to you. - There's rape, murder, the passing of STDs (which is kinda like rape+murder), getting into an abusive relationship with someone who insults your cooking and THEN makes you clean up after his puke, etc etc.  This is subjective, of course. But generally speaking, it's not supposed to be.

While some of the stuff I mentioned might be byproducts of sex, I'm not saying sex is a bad thing. What's wrong is how we think of sex, which leads us to...

2.) Our country flunks sex education in and out of school. In grade 3, a classmate decided to let his wanker out for no reason. Chaos ensued. Everyone ran away from his wanker while he took hot pursuit, laughing madly, reveling in the power and dread of his naked penis. There was no debriefing from this event, no reprimands, no apologies, no explanations. Lesson learned: The penis is to be feared and its power is absolute even authority figures cannot mention it, Voledemort style. In grade 5, in another school, we were given a short lecture on how the reproductive system works. We found out that the sperm fertilizes the vagina and that our bodies are crafted differently to produce these things. Hysteria of giggles over boobies and balls on the anatomical illustrations. I was 11. Lesson learned: sperms created by male bodies magically find eggs created by female bodies and create babies. I found out about the actual act of copulation at 12 from a porn magazine. Lesson learned: only pornstars have great sex. I found out how men and women actually got around to copulation much much later, mostly through historical romances and tagalog pocket books read between covers with flashlights. Maternal granduncle found and burned those books, but could not stop me or my cousins' curiosity. In fact the book burning might have made things worse.

Not once was sex ever discussed as a matter of fact to me by anyone until I finally had sex myself. And THEN a whole torrent of information came in, about the choices you make once you do it; about the right and wrong ways to do it; about healthy relationships and where sex comes in; etc etc.

You'd think all these things were stuff high school students were given the low down on, at least as a response to the wild hormones everyone's supposed to be getting by then.

3.) A negative mindset about pregnancy can contribute to stunted fetal development and a bad start to a very important relationship. Helloooo cortisol. Also, everyone has/had a mother but not everyone has children. Our parents are our first deities. Our relationships with these first Gods result in most of our pathologies later in life. That's why shrinks ask people about what childhood was like for them. While not everyone have ideal planned pregnancies with full back up and financial stability, the guilt and negativity could be severely decreased if the surrounding community were more accepting.

4.) It's shameful because the mother has no support because it's shameful because the mother has no support because it's shameful because... It's not teen pregnancy that's the demon (or motherhood out of wedlock for that matter), it's circular logic. This article is amazing by the way. Although we don't have an active government-run campaign to stop teenage pregnancy, we have people like the dude I unfriended AND commenters AND people who might not have liked or linked to the status message but agreed silently.  What if instead of shaming, we had celebration? We had support? We had people who saw us not to have failed the Strong Woman test but as those who had newer tests of mettle to encounter? What if instead of becoming barricades, people became bridges? What if we had longer maternity leaves, less staring whispering and pointing at pregnant college girls, more information out in the open about child birthing classes for anyone at any age, and generally more opportunities for young women to sire kids on their own?

I'm unmarried, and most people didn't even know I had a boyfriend until I went public about the pregnancy. While my partner has my back, I understand that this is more than what most people with my status receive and I'm grateful (even though I maintained throughout HS that I would raise my own in-vitro-fertilized spawn, again because nobody deserved me). But the first few weeks, I'd tell people with a huge smile on my face and they'd look at my ring finger. And they'd hesitate! The fact of the smile on my face should have told them enough about my excitement for the little one who I deemed to be as royal as my condescending ass. But maybe it didn't matter to them what I thought. Maybe it mattered more that I could now be categorized in an unappealing box that automatically incurred pity rather than celebration.

But I don't want to be married. Me and my partner are absolutely there and care for each other, and we have our own reasons for wanting to keep our statuses as separate entities. It doesn't seem to be enough for other people that we are perfectly happy the way we are though, also for their own reasons.

Hahay mob thinking. Maybe I should just get off facebook altogether.