Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 19, 1993 TAG: 9403180049
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Alan Sorensen
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Consider the curious fact that, even as Christmas approaches, much of our community remains embroiled in deliberation of sin.
I refer, of course, to the controversy aroused by staff writer Beth Macy's article, "Pregnant and Proud," in which she interviewed two unmarried teen-agers who are as the headline describes them.
Personally, I'm proud the newspaper spurred this discussion, and not just because my wife and I have three daughters (should we let them out of the house?), or because the local teen-pregnancy rate is the state's highest. We are, it seems, finally coming to understand this problem's significance as a precursor to other social pathologies, poverty and crime included. We need to talk about it.
Alas, some readers have reacted to the news with outrage against its delivery. Others focus anger on the kids who set out to bear illegitimate children and live off welfare.
To dream of banishing all recognition of the problem, or the purposefully pregnant themselves, may be natural. But it isn't helpful.
Parents chasten a child's behavior without implying that the child is no longer welcome in the family. Communities, likewise, don't always enjoy the luxury of deciding who will and won't be members. Through history, societies have tried to set and enforce norms with strategies such as excommunication, ostracism, exile and execution. These haven't worked noticeably well.
Just as a misbehaved child remains a family member, so teen pregnancy is there when you wake up in the morning. It can't be wished or denounced or punished away. It is a problem not just for a deviant few and their handlers and victims, but for the entire community.
It is so, in part, I think, because sin is more common than we like to admit. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, "The Scarlet Letter," Hester Prynne has a child out of wedlock, and is forced to wear a red letter A on her dress. Yet this punishment, and her exile from the community, fail to shame her into sharing the Puritans' convictions about adultery.
Instead, the letter seems to give her "a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts." She is tempted to believe "that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's."
My point isn't simply that teen pregnancy extends beyond the city of Roanoke, poor blacks and prospective welfare mothers, though this certainly is so. White clients and girls from nice suburban homes are well represented in abortion providers' offices. Though attention dwells on the proudly pregnant, some 80 percent of teen pregnancies are unintended. And, as Charles Murray observed in a recent Wall Street Journal article, headlined "The Coming White Underclass," 22 percent of white births were to single mothers in 1991, most of them women with less than a high-school education.
Nor is my point merely that the community ends up paying the wages of sin anyway, though this also is true. Virginia taxpayers spend hundreds of millions a year to support families started by teens, not to mention the costs of lost productivity and increased drug abuse, mental illness and violence.
Nor am I saying that teen pregnancy is the entire community's problem merely because the community must be part of the solution, though this is true as well.
Consider the demography of black families. From 1890 to 1960, the percentage of black households headed by a wife and a husband remained virtually the same in every 10-year census - around 80 percent. Suddenly, during the 1960s, the figure plunged to 64 percent. Now it is under 40 percent.
What happened? A combination, it seems, of eroding inner-city employment, which reduced black men's value as husbands and fathers; the replacement of men by the welfare state as provider for many families; the departure of middle-class blacks, and with them, community support structures and role models; continuing racism and discrimination; the devastating proliferation of guns and drugs.
In light of these sorts of trends, it is vitally important - but not enough - to call for ethical behavior and personal responsibility.
In a speech to a mostly black audience in Memphis last month, President Clinton said that civilizing change in America's urban centers must come from "the inside out." Those most affected by the physical, social and moral deterioration of their communities must assume primary responsibility for reversing it.
Urgently correct, and welcome words from a liberal. But the rest of us need to be reminded of our responsibilities as well.
Teens ought not to get pregnant on purpose; neither should they believe that no one cares about them unless they have a baby. Neither should they lack allies to protest federal entitlements that offer more benefits to the wealthy than to the poorest.
My larger point is that this is a community problem because all of society is imperiled if we smugly or resentfully assume that the "crisis of spirit," to which Clinton referred in his speech, is an inner-city crisis alone.
Three decades have seen a 560 percent increase in violent crime and more than a 400 percent rise in illegitimate births in America. Frightening. But where is the moral compass of a country that condemns so many of its citizens to lives of terror and hopelessness?
And how can one ignore the impact not of deviant immorality but of mainstream values on America's urban crisis? Violence, weakened family ties, poor education and critical-thinking skills, video vacuity, self-esteem prized over self-respect, immediate gratification, commodities as status symbols, sex as recreation and conquest - are these cultural phenomena peculiar to the ghetto?
The sins of the fathers are visited on a community's most vulnerable members. As William Bennett, the former secretary of education, suggests, "We live in a culture which at times seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to assuring the loss of their innocence before their time."
That is sad, and these are our children. We cannot disown them.
by CNB