Ready or not, teens make reproductive choices

I'm more fascinated than shocked by this story...

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

Apparently this town is so small, isolated and economically depressed, having babies right now is the best thing these girls can think to do with their lives. As a teen mom myself, I can sympathize. Obviously being a teenager makes motherhood harder, but it doesn't make it any less rewarding.

Now the community is divided over whether to provide easier access to contraception. (The nearest women's clinic is 20 miles away.) I don't know how anyone could object to the idea. Girls can decide to get pregnant at 15, and there's no stopping that. If you force girls to choose between abstinence and pregnancy, some are going to choose pregnancy, because teen pregnancy is not the end of the world. Where is the harm in giving them another option?

Not that it would have done anything to prevent this; nothing can prevent girls from getting pregnant on purpose. Teenagers make reproductive choices, whether we think they're ready or not. Denying them access to contraception only makes it harder for the girls who don't want to have babies.