Carol wrote a
post on the group of 16-year-old girls who made the pregnancy pact along with the news story on it. After reading the post, it seems like the news channel was putting a lot of blame on the sexual education system and considered the cause of the situation to be failure of the system. Carol even goes on the state that the system needs to be changed in order to prevent such “scandals” from happening again. I can’t help but wonder who really is to blame, or what influenced this situation. I don’t think I’d be able to give a correct answer, but I feel like many of our keywords can be used as a way to analyze the cause of this situation.
First, there’s the
media. How does what we see, hear, and read affect our lives? Of course recently, as mentioned in class, the movie,
Juno, is based upon teenage pregnancy. Also pointed out in class, other forms of
visual media are based on pregnancies such as
Knocked Up,
Secret Life of an American Teenager, and even Oprah’s
interview with the pregnant man. With this said, couldn’t what we watch in our homes and in movie theaters also be an influence of this situation? We fall in love with Juno’s character and support what she's doing as we watch the movies. The movie ends up almost glorifying her as a strong, independent teenager.
The contradiction here is teenagers are considered to be the
youth of our culture and the
youth is seen as being naïve and unfit to make logical and rational decisions for themselves. This is why the parents in the news clip seem disappointed in the decisions made by these teenagers. Juno contradicts our common conception of "youth," because it shows Juno as a teenager able to make rational and mature decisions given certain situations despite what older
generations may think.
Biologically, 16-year-old females are physically ready to have children. Our
history as humans is an everlasting example of this. In older cultures 16-year-old females were sometimes expected to have children with men who were much older. Kings would have multiple concubines kept for the purpose of having children. At 16, the female body has already developed all the necessary reproductive organs to have a child. Instead, our culture tells the female she cannot have a child even if her body is physically ready to have one because parents think, and may often be right, that teenagers cannot provide for themselves or the newborn child.
Again, how can we just blame sexual education systems for something like this when commercialism pushes and force-feeds us sex all the time? The common slogan “sex sells” is true and can be seen in advertisement with both female and male models
(not to mention the infamous Abercrombie and Fitch ads).
Consumerism is driven by our personal, and sometimes perverted, interest in sex. So, why couldn’t we say that consumerism and advertisements are also part of the influences of the pregnancy pact?
As I have stated before, I couldn’t give a correct answer, but it seems to me that the pregnancy pact raises a lot of questions about what our culture has become and what it portrays to teenagers. We promote sex in consumerism and provide entertainment based on pregnancies, but then turn around and say that teenage pregnancy is irresponsible because teenagers are presumably unfit to make rational decisions for themselves even though their bodies are physically ready to reproduce. I'm not saying that teenage pregnancy should be socially accepted, but I am questioning why we blame sexual eduation systems as the main reason. Parents and our culture tell us that teenagers are unfit to have children, but biology would say that teenagers are physically ready to have children. Sexual education tells teenagers to be careful or not have sex while our entertainment and advertisements push sex in our faces. It seems a teenager could get pretty confused about their sexual feelings leading them to make decisions such as becoming pregnant.