HUZZAH! Banned from Rentech.com!
ZephyrZodiac:
Apologies, Hook, I hadn't intentionally left out the teenager who actually wants to get pregnant and doesn't care who she hurts in order to succeed! And obviously, a young man who has no wish to become a father just yet, and probably only with someone he's in love with, is very much the victim in those circumstances! He can be taken to court for child support, and that is both unjust and unkind!
The point I was trying to make is that in a genuine caring partnership between two young people, babies are generally an accident rather than a deliberate choice, but most young men do not run a mile at the thought of becoming a dad - lots of them make a really good job of being supportive and helping with everything.
Inge:
Although most people are in disagreement with me, it's heartwarming to see that it's possible to have a controversial discussion politely, and what's interesting is that it is taking place on one of the few forum sites that don't censor threads for flaming etc. Just goes to show if you treat people like adults they'll behave like adults! :)
Brynne:
I don't think I've blinked since I started reading this thread. And I hit the "reply" button and just stared at my screen for a few minutes without typing. I'm not a doctor, and I don't play one on TV, so all I can contribute to this is personal experience. The two points that jumped out at me were the "A baby should be a child of society" idea which is not my way of thinking at all, and the "healthy gene pool" thing, which makes me think of of the people that go to specialized sperm-donor clinics so they can have their problem-free genius child and not an "imperfect" child like mine.
As for the child of society, here are my thoughts: I had my son at age 24 and was clueless as to how much was involved! It was not a planned pregnancy, but it was a nice surprise for my husband and me. My husband was in the military and was not making much income and had to take a second job. Both my parents and my in-laws helped us out financially from time to time, I hated asking them for money. I also had to go on WIC in order to buy formula for my son (he just had to have the soy, oy!), and, although I'm extremely grateful for programs like those, my husband and I were very happy to go off it when he got out of the military and started earning more money. And then, as I've said many times in this forum, we found out Jamie had asperger's (shutup, JM ;)) and would require many doctor's visits, speech pathologists, and other assorted experts. Georgia has a great early-intervention program to help children like Jamie, so, again, outside support. And again, very very thankful. But I was not brought up in the Hillary Rodham Clinton "It Takes a Village" camp. Or is it "It Takes a Camp" village? (Pardon my silliness. It's late and I've been up for 36 hours straight.) I am raising my son. I had help from some wonderful programs, and my parents do the occasional babysitting, but I deal with the day to day. And I think that's perfectly all right. It would drive me nuts to have relatives taking over my childcare duties, but that's a matter of personal opinion. My mom has just started her artistic design business(I don't remember what she calls it. She does high-end faux-finishes and murals) , and it's really taking off. She's flying to Denver to work for clients out there and she has many clients here. Extremely busy person. My 89 year old Grandma does volunteer work at both her church and the hospital and has a social life I envy. Those are my role models.
On the second point, (which I understand was about age-related gene health and not sperm clinics) that's stilll getting a little too selective for my taste, and would result in a very robotic, sterilized world if we all focused on that aspect. One thing I now know at age 35 that I never gave much thought to back in my baby-sitting years was, when you take on the responsibility of having a child, you must be ready to accept that this child may very well not be the child you imagined your little dolls being and, unfortunately, the older you are, the greater the risk and you have to take that into account. I think it's a hard thing to accept at any age and I don't think there is any way teenagers can be prepared for this, transitioning from perfect baby-powder scented dolls to real flawed tiny messy humans. And who here can say that they don't have flaws? Ok, JM probably would jump up at this, but the rest of us mere mortals are imperfect and were not exactly what our parents dreamt of when they were younger. I'm pretty sure my mom didn't play with a "collicky Val" doll as a youngster. And the dream-baby scenario for the child she already had named while daydreaming in Chemistry class probably was not "Toddler Val eats an entire box of chocolate ex-lax thinking it's candy. Or practices her big girl potty training in full view on a display toilet at Sears." I certainly didn't expect to have an autistic child. But I have one, and he's perfect.
I know you weren't taking things to that extreme, Inge, I just got off on a general rant, there.
I cannot think of a 15 or 16 year old as someone emotionally ready to have a child. Sure, there are very responsible 15/16 year-olds, but that's relatively speaking. They still have no real world experience. And if they do, it's probably not a good real world experience, in which case they were "forced to grow up fast". For the most well-adjusted teens at that age it is, at least in my mind, still not unlike TS2 with babies giving off false advertising by being cute and cuddly and provoking budding maternal (or paternal) feelings. Teenagers may think they need to go there, but they don't. Not yet.
ZephyrZodiac:
I remember a friend of mine from when I was a teenager. Thi girl got pregnant while still 15, married the father on her 16th birthday and they got a small flat. she had the baby, then two more in quick succession, so by the time she was 21 she was more like a middle-aged woman than most middle-aged women are! She'd had no teenage fun, never had a job, she was stuck in the house all day with three kids. Her father died quite suddenly just after she got married, her mother had already gone off with someone else, his parents were as supportive as they could be, but in the end, she was left alone to look after these kids all day while her husband was at work. This all happened before the pill was readily available to teenagers, and certainly not available to under 16s. With the current easy access to birth control, this kind of scenario should never happen, but unfortunately it still does!
veilchen:
That is a whole other arena of potentially serious problems when a baby is not the perfect little dolly that can be put away in the toy-box when they are finished playing with it. Children born with health problems need their mother/father/caregiver even more than a regular, just colicky, fussy, or lively baby does.
I was extremely lucky, but I know many who weren't. They never-the-less do love the child with all their heart; most are emotionally able to care for the child, some are not. I takes someone with great maturity, vast amounts of patience, and a willingness to sacrifice to care for a child with problems, so that the child has at least a decent chance to function later on in life. I applaud Georgia for their far-sightedness, the health care situation in the US boggles the mind. There are developing countries out there with a better health care system; I guess when they speak of one of "the richest countries" in the world, they meant the individual super-rich, not the population as a whole (I'm going off the band-wagon now).
Hook, even though I know for a fact that some young women/teenagers do deceive their sexual partner because they want a pregnancy, the majority of cases is about young women/teenager who become pregnant due to inexperience, lack of birth control devices, and pressure to yield to sexual intercourse. Society at large expects the woman to take care of the birth control, and is ready to blame her when she becomes pregnant anyway. Many men don't even want to wear condoms, the one device, in conjunction with spermicides, that prevents pregnancy and STD's. This reminds me of a friend of mine who told her partner "If you don't wear the glove, you're not coming up to bat."
The majority of cases of a pregnancy that was achieved by deceiving the male partner is by women older than that, and usually is done with financial or emotional extortion in mind (or both).
The 'village' thing is not a bad idea either, but you can't force a society to take on that attitude. It is still prevalent in the smaller towns and villages in Europe, at least in mine. We have a grand total of 356 souls in that village, and you can bet that everyone knows everyone else, their ancestors, their ancestoral history, their bed-time, in short, if you want to keep a secret, you better be wily. Everyone keeps an eye out for everyone else, including watching all the village children. It can be suffocating, but its really easy to adjust once you mature; you might even appreciate it. As a teenager, I hated it. If I messed up, my parents usually knew about it before I got home. Believe it or not, but I even know most of the villagers cats and dogs by name.
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