In a recent exclusive interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News’ “On the Record,” unwed mother and gubernatorial daughter Bristol Palin spoke out about the hardships of teen parenting, as well as her hope of becoming an advocate for teen abstinence.
Of particular interest was Palin’s statement that teens are broadly accepting of premarital sex, and that expecting youth to abstain was “not realistic at all.” The new mom and 18-year-old daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also urged peers to wait 10 years to have a baby.
When discussing teen pregnancy and Bristol Palin’s “it-can-happen-to-anyone” pro-abstinence message, you can’t help but pause first to applaud the pro-life decisions surrounding the birth of Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston last December. Amid a strident presidential campaign in which the ramifications of public scandal were potentially explosive, Bristol Palin and family accepted without compromise Tripp’s inalienable right to be born alive. That decision – combined with Gov. Palin’s devotion to Down syndrome baby Trig Palin – was perhaps the fiercest public rebuke of the pro-abortion movement in a decade.
Yet it remains an unsettling fact of American life that teen pregnancy is becoming trendy. In 1960, only 5 percent of all births were to unwed mothers. Today that figure is pushing 40 percent across the general population and 70 percent among blacks. The material, economic and social disadvantages of single parenting are well-documented: Single moms are at risk of chronic poverty, and the children of single mothers have high risk of dropout, drugs, jail and worse. Forget “Juno” – teen and single motherhood is a national catastrophe.
Far from being a “teen problem,” however, the epidemic of teen pregnancy is primarily a parenting crisis. In past generations, parents knew better than to allow teens to commingle unsupervised for long periods of time prior to career age. The sexual trends of past eras reflect such clear-headed norms: As was reported in the September 2005 Review of General Psychology, researchers at San Diego State University found that 13 percent of young women were sexually active in 1943, and public approval of premarital sex was just 12 percent. Today’s parents, tragically cut off from the wisdom of prior generations, permit young teens to date seriously, longingly, emotionally and recklessly for sustained periods of time. The result is what we should expect: Teens everywhere are sexing it up and getting pregnant.
Over the past few generations, a perfect storm of increasing industrialization and extended higher education prolonged career age as much as eight to 10 years, putting enormous strain on teen dating relationships. In prior generations, when an 18-year-old could enter a trade and support a family, it was natural and reasonable for teens to marry at ages much closer to the onset of puberty. But with educational preparations now extending into the mid-20s, a 10-year gap has opened up between nature’s own green light and the ability of young people to provide for a family. Bridging that gap is one of the most difficult challenges parents face in modern society.
If current trends are to be reversed, however, adults must accept that teen pregnancy is a phenomenon parents foster by permitting kids to date seriously prior to career age. Love and attraction are powerful forces of nature, and allowing teens to wade into steady dating relationships is like sending kids kite surfing in a hurricane. After all, pregnancy isn’t contracted through coughing and sneezing. As Dr. Maria Kefalas, associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University, stated in the New York Times: “For teens, sex requires time and a lack of supervision.”
As part of nature’s awesome powers, attraction forces kick into high gear when people have time to bond emotionally and secluded places to engage in the marital act. Even in today’s permissive society I have yet to see teens become pregnant at restaurants, baseball games or other supervised social gatherings. Bristol Palin and daddy Levi Johnston had been dating for about a year, and I’m confident the young couple behaved themselves in public places while supervised by adults.
As might be expected, the liberal solution to teen pregnancy – “don’t supervise kids’ dating habits: give them birth control instead!” – is no solution. As we see from multi-generational statistics, the policy of permitting and subsidizing teenage sex has caused sexual activity, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases to skyrocket. In one startling 2008 report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed that one out of every four teen girls is carrying a sexually transmitted disease.
The “kids-are-going-to-do-it” excuse does not require that we promote teen sex with condom giveaways and chemical cocktails for snuffing out unplanned babies. Instead, Bristol Palin should take her abstinence message to parents: It is parents who must learn to supervise and limit their child’s alone time with the opposite sex, and it is parents who can direct their kids towards other meaningful activities altogether.
In the Van Susteren interview, the unwed mom’s own mom, Sarah Palin, didn’t communicate the message quite clearly enough. “Bristol is an example that it can happen to anybody,” the Alaska governor said. “Great athlete, great student, great aspirations – it did happen to her.”
In truth, it didn’t “happen to her,” nor does teen pregnancy “just happen to anybody.” As Dr. Kefalas rightly points out, teen sex happens to those who have lots of spare time and a lack of parental supervision.
