Editorial: A 'pact' about parenthood needed
The MetroWest Daily News
Gloucester's "pregnancy pact" is increasingly looking like an urban legend. Time magazine first reported that around half of the 17 pregnant students at Gloucester High had made a coordinated effort to get pregnant, but the source of the story has now backed off and some of the pregnant girls have responded to the national media frenzy by saying they knew of no such agreement.
But even if there's no truth to it, the non-story is unlikely to disappear from the national debate. When it comes to teenagers and sex, fiction often outlasts fact. Remember the furor over an "epidemic" of oral sex among teenagers, allegedly inspired by Monica Lewinsky and the rationalization that oral sex was a way to preserve virginity? Research by the Alan Guttmacher Institute has debunked the story, but its findings have barely dented what has become a popular myth.
The Gloucester story is given a boost beyond its prurient appeal because groups with political axes to grind are using it for their own purposes. Those in support of comprehensive sex education - which means teaching kids about contraception and can include distribution of condoms or making birth control available without a parent's consent - claim the case as proof the girls were inadequately taught. Groups in favor of abstinence-only sex education blame Gov. Deval Patrick, who has rejected federal funds for programs that preach against sex before marriage.
But the facts in the Gloucester story, to the extent they are known, support neither agenda. These girls apparently knew that sex causes pregnancy and that contraception prevents it. They chose - some of them, at least - to take the risk and accept the consequences.
The problem, it appears, is less with the curriculum than the culture. While the armies of the Left and Right have spent 40 years fighting over sex - mostly through proxy battles on issues like sex education, parental notification and contraception - the culture forgot to teach children some fundamental things about parenthood, especially how much easier this excruciatingly difficult task is when undertaken by a married couple instead of a single mom.
In a study that received far less notice than Gloucester's "pregnancy pact," Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies reported that in 2006, a majority of all births to American women under 30 were out of wedlock, apparently for the first time in history.
The "family values" crowd missed the boat on this one. Fixated on gay couples as a threat to marriage and abortion as a threat to babies, they failed to notice that heterosexual couples had stopped getting married and that babies were increasingly being born without a family to give them the economic and emotional security they need to thrive.
Liberals dropped the ball as well. In defending women's rights to abortion and a more accepting attitude toward sex, they neglected to note that child welfare begins with parents who have a stable relationship.
The real story at Gloucester High - and at high schools across the nation - isn't that kids have casual, uninformed attitudes toward sex. It's that they know and care too little about what it takes to raise healthy children.
Liberals and conservatives should make a pact of their own, to put aside '60s-era arguments over sex and work together on ways to teach children realistic lessons about parenthood.