According to the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, almost 60 percent of teens with a school-age pregnancy drop out of high school. Only 2 percent of teen mothers will graduate from college. Eighty-two percent of children whose parents do not have a high school diploma live in poverty. Seventy-five percent of unmarried teen mothers begin to receive welfare within five years of their first child. Almost 80 percent of fathers to children with teen mothers will not marry the mothers and will pay less than $800 annually in child support. The daughters of teen mothers are three times more likely to become teenage mothers themselves as compared to daughters of mothers ages 20 and 21. The dismal statistics go on and on.
Read the comments. The problem is that abortion isn’t used often enough, according to this author’s readers. What a tragic way to frame the problem. Also, commenters say that contraception isn’t available to these girls. That’s not the case, most often. These girls come themselves from broken or never-formed homes, and being a mother gives their lives meaning. Many, many times the pregnancy is deliberate. Killing the baby won’t fill the holes in these young women’s hearts.
Could you pollsters tell me why there has been this deterioration in black (or African American) morality? Some recent historians (eg Tom Sowell, if I remember correctly) have shown how strong and how moral the black community was until the 1960s. Presumably we cannot lay the blame at the door of the liberal churches – these girls would mostly relate to black-led churches with very traditional moral values. Obviously, part of the blame is the glamorous rap culture with all its inherent violence and absurd emphasis on respect and its glorification of gang life. But why should this culture take such deep roots in the black community? Can anybody enlighten me?
Terry Tee, to answer your question in one word: “welfare.”
Terry Tee: The answer is very complex, with as many variations as there are black teens. I worked in a black neighborhood in Americus, GA 20+ years ago; my responsibility was for the HFH homeowners and their children. For one of our families a generations was 14 years…I worked with a five generation family.
The great-grandmother told me that she had told her grand-daughter, “don’t bring me no lap-trouble” – don’t get pregnant. The grandmother told me that when she was a girl she would lie down for any man who would buy her a soda-pop. As a young woman her husband was hanged by the KKK, when she went to cut him down, they threatenedd to hang her too. She told the KKK, “If I don’t cut him down, God will put me in hell.” The mother carried a bullet in her neck from a time when her drunken husband threw money on the floor and she bent to pick it up…he shot her. They were still married, but now when he threw money at her she kicked it back to him and told him to pick it up himself. The mother told me that her 14 yearold daughter had just had a baby in the neighboring state. The women seemed proud that they produced young by the time they were fourteen.
One of my close friends in the black community told me that when the gas bill came due her mother would tell her, “You’re pretty. Go out on ‘the avenue’ and get us some money.” She said that she didn’t know she was doing anything wrong.
Another friend had 3 children by a man who was married to a woman who was sterile, he had promised my friend that, if she had a boy, he would divorce his wife and marry her. She had three girls before she wised up.
Adult and teen illiteracy was very high. Welfare grants stopped covering kids when they hit sixteen unless thay were in school.
Girls were told, “You better get yourself a baby so you can have some money.” They knew that more babies meant more money but didn’t have the math skills to figure out that the more children they had, the less money they had per person in the family.
Whether or not the young people were motivated to wait until they were married to have sexual intercourse depended pretty much on how closely they were connected to a church community, whether their father was part of the family constellation, whether they had managed to learn how to read, and how much hope they had for a future. It also depended in part on what tribe in Africa their ancesters had come from and what the traditional practice had been there.
There is also this factor operating in teen culture: half a century ago girls usually married before they turned twenty…in some areas between the 16th and seventeenth birthday… and they stayed married to the same man until one of them died; today adolesence is prolonged until a person graduates from college…maybe even grad school… with mom and/or dad footing all the bills. There is no cultural containment for or restraint of raging hormones. Movies, TV, Planned Parenthood, sex education courses, never even suggest that the teen ager practice a little self control and wait for marriage. The person who has grown up expecting every desire to be instantly gratified just doesn’t have a chance to develop self control. The church, in most of its manifestations, doesn’t give the kids that kind of training or frankly promote the kind of life that is consistant with the teachings of Holy Scripture.