Authorities in Texas have removed 53 teen girls from a polygamist compound and they report that 31 of them are pregnant or have already had children.  That's 57% of the girls.  Creepy, dangerous, sad, shocking, awful - it seems like everyone has an opinion.  It also seems as if there are unlimited resources to deal with this problem.  Child Protective Services, the foster care system, law enforcement, the news media, the healthcare system, religious entities, groups like the ACLU - all these and more are concerned, engaged, watching, helping, hoping.

These girls and their children are important, and their fates and futures hang in the balance to be sure.  But what about the millions of other teenage girls in this country who are growing up in situations which lead them to teen pregnancy and childbearing?  There are communities all over the United States where more than half of girls get pregnant as teens.  Among Latina girls in this country, 53% get pregnant at least once as teens.  Among African American girls, 51%.  In fact, 30% of ALL teen girls in America get pregnant before age 20.  That means every state, every county, every community, every high school, and more and more junior high schools too.

Where is the outcry about these girls?  Where is the intervention?  Where is the government, the news media, the cultural intelligentsia?  Why are the little voices inside our heads that are asking so many questions about the FLDS girls - about their clothes, their lifestyles, their beliefs, their parents, their community - why are those voices so silent about the fates and futures of the girls elsewhere in this country?

One of those compound girls had a baby yesterday.  She delivered her son while child welfare officials, state troopers, reporters, and others waited outside the hospital maternity ward.  She is one of 750,000 teen girls who will have a baby this year.  Who is waiting for them?

Let mine be blogosphere comment 67 million regarding 15-year-old Miley Cyrus and the nude-but-covered photo of her that appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair. Three modest thoughts: 

1. A parent interviewed on Good Morning America this morning suggested that---I'm paraphrasing here---that the photo wasn't as bad as it could be...that you couldn't see the curve of Miley's back..that Annie Liebovitz is a respected photographer, etc.  Huh?  This is not a discussion about art and taste and nudity, this is a discussion about a 15-year-old girl who posed nude and the publication of that photo. 
2. The GMA segment went on to suggest that the Miley photo could serve as a teachable moment (now in the running as one of the most overused phrases of 2008).  What's the teachable moment here?  Fifteen year old girls shouldn't be asked to pose nude.  End of lesson. 
3. When this story broke yesterday about the Miley photo, the Vanity Fair website apparently crashed due to overwhelming traffic.  Remember people, it's not what they're selling, it's what you're buying.

In an effort to get the word out about the StayTV Mash Up contest, I came across a really great web resource, Teens Today With Vanessa Van Petten.  Vanessa, a self-described "Gen Y'er", is an author, teen mentor, and general proponent of getting teens informed about the risk of teen pregnancy - you can see why we like her!  We also love her site and she was gracious enough to give us a little shout out...so, to return the favor, get yourself to Teens Today and read her latest entry about how parents can talk to teens about sex, love, and relationships.  And, if you can't bear to navigate away from Pregnant Pause for even a second, here is a clip of the vlog (video blog) that accompanies the post:

Starr went to the clinic on Friday to have an abortion.  She's 16 and the situation is pretty bad.  She went by herself and despite putting on a brave face, she was terrified.  She can't have an abortion in Pennsylvania (where she lives) without her parents knowing so she rode a bike to the bus station and took the bus to a clinic in New Jersey.  Her parents don't even know she's had sex and they certainly don't know she's pregnant.  They've already forbidden her from seeing her boyfriend and her father even threatened to kill him.  As it turns out, she didn't go through with the abortion after all.  Moments before the procedure was to begin, her boyfriend showed up at the clinic...

Well it should be - it's a soap opera.  But "One Life to Live" is dealing with some very real-life issues in the story of 16-year-old Starr Manning's pregnancy.  And one thing that's been made quite clear to Starr, and by extension to her fans, is that once there's an unplanned pregnancy, none of the options are easy.

Two events of interest taking place deep inside the Beltway this Wednesday:

1. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing Wednesday on abstinence education programs. 
2. The Brookings Institution is holding a gabfest (they are always interesting) with some thoughtful folks on the effects of media on young people and children.  The Future of Children Journal, "Children and Electronic Media," published by Brookings and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, will be released at the event.

More in due course on both...

Just in time for the DVD release of Juno tomorrow, CDC's National Center for Health Statistics has released new teen pregnancy data.  Good news---teen pregnancy declined 5% between 2002 and 2004. 

Of course, this news may leave some scratching their heads and wondering, "didn't the CDC just say that teen pregnancy rates were increasing?"  Close but not quite.  In December 2007, NCHS reported a 3% increase in the teen birth rate, not the pregnancy rate. 

Still confused?  Read on and be enlightened.

Read a statement from NC CEO Sarah Brown here.   Read a data cheat sheet here.  Read the NCHS report here.

When it comes to teen and unplanned pregnancy, 2007 was in many ways the perfect storm.  After all, 2007 saw the release of the movies Knocked Up,  Waitress, and Juno.  It was the year that brought the first increase in the teen birth rate in 15 years.  And it was the year of breathless, 24/7, coverage of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears' baby bump to be. 

Cultural warriors and pop culture devotees have taken to their respective corners in interpreting the meaning of all this mishegoss.  We revisit all this due to the DVD release tomorrow of the Academy Award winning, indie-licious Juno. 

Generally speaking, the cultural warriors have been quick to pounce on the happily-ever-after nature of the movie--less than 3% of teen moms actually put their baby up for adoption, and exactly how many boys actually hang around in real life, critics wonder. As Laura Sessions Stepp of the Washington Post noted in a recent column, "Hollywood's attitude these days toward being young, single and pregnant by mistake: It's no big deal."

Pop culture devotees have been more sanguine.  This review from the Rotten Tomatoes website is typical: "Coming-of-age meets coming-to-term, in a film that is refreshingly frank about sex and love, pokes fun at the clashes between age and class, and, even more subversively...celebrates the pregnant possibilities of the non-nuclear family."

So, are both sides right?  Is this movie item number one on the teachable moments list or movie bad example?  Or are both sides missing the entertainment forest for the life lesson trees?   Your thoughts?

Bill's post on Straight Edge got me thinking about abstinence and what it means to declare yourself a "Virgin" (you can almost hear the capital letter 'V').  I was a student at an all-girls, Catholic high school.  It was a wonderful academic environment and - contrary to what you might have heard - we had regular dances and social events, shared with the neighboring all boys' Catholic high school. 

With this proximity to (gasp!) the opposite sex AND a rigorous dedication to creating a sheltered...goody-goody...parochial  secondary education experience, one might assume that the administration would have jumped at the chance to present its captive audience of impressionable young girls with the chance to sign a virginity pledge. 

What hath Ian MacKaye wrought? 

As leader of the great and seminal (Don't believe me?  Look it up here and here) punk band Minor Threat, Ian wrote a song way back in 1981--I think Taft was President at the time--called "Straight Edge."  In the song he celebrates his own choice not to drink, smoke, or do drugs; his straight edge. 

Quite unintentionally, at least according to what MacKaye has said in the past, the song took on a life of its own and became a rallying cry for many young people nationwide.  Since then, the straight edge "movement" has taken on a life of its own and now means many things to many people.  Some in the abstinence movement have, apparently, even latched onto the straight edge concept.

Tonight, the National Geographic Channel premieres a documentary on adherents to the straight edge lifestyle.  

This week MomLogic.com, a website community where Moms from all walks of life and in all stages of motherhood come together, launched the first of their three-part series on Spring Break and teens. Not surprisingly, what they found when they went on location at South Padre Island, TX was a variety of drunk, drunker, and drunkest kids - not all of whom were 21+ - reveling in the lack of parental authority.

On its face, Spring Break is a chance for kids to escape the pressure of school and spend a week relaxing on the beach. Dig a little deeper, as MomLogic did, and see that its become a weeklong binge of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous and unsafe sex - all those things that make parents cringe in horror. Of course many teens and 20-somethings manage to have a Spring Break that balances fun and responsible behavior, but for every one of those young people are 10 who are busily engaged in the behaviors that MomLogic filmed.

Check out the first part of their three part series here (Spring Break Confessions), with Parts II and III being posted today and tomorrow.

 My brother teaches at an inner-city middle school and his 8th graders are currently in the throes of their "reproductive system" unit.  One thing the students are doing is caring for baby dolls or flour sack babies in order to simulate parenthood - they have to carry them, feed them, nap them, and "basically parent them for an entire week."  He says it's really gratifying (and cute!) to see these normally tough kids become protective and parental.  "They're taking it so seriously!  They're all bugging out about how much work it is to take care of a baby." 

He also told me that one teacher showed the old Molly Ringwald movie For Keeps - about a teen couple that has a baby and how their lives change drastically as a result.  He reports that the kids "are more freaked out about what life looked like in the 80s than they are about the idea of becoming teen parents."  Ha!  Note to 8th graders:  Big hair isn't forever.  A baby is.

On our first blog entry, we received a comment from Joi regarding adoption and teen moms:

I am a former high school teacher turned teen pregnancy presentor. Started a program 6.5 years ago talking to teens about the 3 options they face if they are in an unplanned pregnancy. Use this site quite a lot for facts, ideas, etc. Would like to know why adoption doesn't get much of a mention here?

Joi's comment is actually a pretty common one in our circle and every so often we are asked about the prevalence of adoption among teen moms.  While adoption is obviously another option for teens if they face an unplanned pregnancy, the fact is that less than 3% actually choose adoption - fewer than 12,000 each year.  In the absence of government statistics on adoption, and the small number of adoptions that occur, research on adoption, including the reasons for adoption and consequences of adoption (for both mom and baby) is rare.

So, while movies such as Juno might suggest that adoption is a common alternative to teen pregnancy, most teenagers decide to keep their baby and take on the daunting task of raising a child themselves at a very young age.

Over the years, Campaign surveys have offered up two striking and consistent conclusions: (1) teens consistently say that parents most influence their decisions about sex, and (2) parents freely admit that they know--in their souls--that they should talk to their kids about sex, love, relationships and values but that they don't know what to say or when to start the conversation. 

Help is on the way.

A new book, Like Whatever: The Insiders Guide to Raising Teens contains a terrific chapter on teens and sex authored by former Campaign family member Karen Troccoli.

For the Campaign's tips for parents, do that mouse-click thing here.