Teen Pregnancy Boom A Wake-Up Call
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By DERON SNYDER
There was welcome good news last month regarding teen pregnancies, at least at the national level. Unfortunately, students at Frayser High School in Memphis didn’t get the message, considering reports that about 90 girls are pregnant or have given birth in the last year.
That’s a stark contrast to a federal report on the 2009 teen birth rate — 39.1 per 1,000 women — which was the lowest rate in nearly 70 years of record-keeping on the issue. By comparison, about 17 percent of Frayser’s 508 girls are either currently pregnant or recently had babies.
What we have is a failure to communicate. What we need are more drastic, in-your-face approaches.
My first thought was something along the lines of Scared Straight!, the 1978 Academy Award-winning documentary on a prison diversion program at Rahway State Prison. Several reincarnations have followed since then, including Beyond Scared Straight, which attracted a record A&E audience when it debuted last week. I thought if teenage girls could get a firsthand look at the struggles, challenges and problems associated with teenage pregnancy, that might steer them clear.
But it occurred to me that the girls at Frayser DO have a firsthand look – through the lives of their teenage classmates who became pregnant and had babies. Yet, more and more of them continue down the same path, a virtual one-way ticket to persistent poverty. Even shows like MTV’s 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom, which purport to discourage teen girls from becoming mothers, add a certain glamour to the subjects’ lives just by putting them on TV.
