Word: birthed
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...public high school in the U.S. to have its own full-service health clinic in the building. Set up by St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center, it offered everything from immunizations to sport physicals to treatment for venereal disease. Significantly, it also advised teenagers on contraception and dispensed prescriptions for birth control devices (provided that parents had agreed beforehand to allow their children to visit the clinic...
These efforts are aimed at what may be the true root of the teenage pregnancy problem: not simply lack of sex education or access to birth control but a sense of worthlessness and despair. Recounts Watson of Crittenton Center: "The girls tell me, 'Before I was pregnant, I was nothing. Now I am somebody. I'm a mother.' " As long as adolescents look in the mirror and see nobody there, they are likely to seek identity by becoming--ready or not--somebody's mother. --By Claudia Wallis. Reported by Cathy Booth/New York, Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago
...magnitude of the problem and its consequences. Teen pregnancy imposes lasting hardships on two generations: parent and child. Teen mothers are, for instance, many times as likely as other women with young children to live below the poverty level. According to one study, only half of those who give birth before age 18 complete high school (as compared with 96% of those who postpone childbearing). On average, they earn half as much money and are far more likely to be dependent on welfare: 71% of females under 30 who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children had their first child...
...parents too immature to understand why their baby is crying or how their doll-like plaything has suddenly developed a will of its own. Finally, these children of children are prone to dropping out and becoming teenage parents themselves. According to one study, 82% of girls who give birth at age 15 or younger were daughters of teenage mothers...
...understand the nature of the problem, one must look beyond statistics and examine the dramatic changes in attitudes and social mores that have swept through American culture over the past 30 years. The teenage birth rate was actually higher in 1957 than it is today, but that was an era of early marriage, when nearly a quarter of 18-and 19-year-old females were wedded. The overwhelming majority of teen births in the '50s thus occurred in a connubial context, and mainly to girls 17 and over. Twenty and 30 years ago, if an unwed teenager should, heaven forbid...