THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606140017
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 47 lines
The high rate of teen pregnancies is, as our Mother's Day editorial pointed out, more often than not disastrous; first, for the teens, whether they abort or give birth.
Marriages hastened by teen pregnancies aren't invariably doomed. Children, however, are almost always unready to take on the pressing duties of spousehood, parenthood and breadwinning, and their divorce rate is quite high.
Whether or not they wed, and most frequently they don't, today's teen mothers tend to be single parents with scant education, no job skills and little or no income. The deck is stacked cruelly against them and their offspring.
But it takes two people to produce a pregnancy. The males who impregnate teens are very often not teens themselves and so are adult sex abusers of children. The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that 86 percent of teen mothers' children are fathered by males at least 20 years old or older. Of 535 teen mothers in Washington state, 62 percent had been raped or molested before their pregnancies by men whose mean age was 27.
These predators - not infrequently stepfathers of the teens they abuse, or boyfriends of the teens' mothers - are rarely blamed for the pregnancies that most of us deplore and the subsequent induced abortions, spontaneous abortions and births.
On this Father's Day, children honor fathers who are also men enough to be dads, if circumstances permit. Dads are different. Dads are there for their children, or want to be.
Time and again, divorce shuts out of their children's lives fathers who want to be dads (and some mothers who want to be moms).
That's tragic enough. American life is poorer for the damage wrought upon and by torn-apart families. We are poorer also for all the impoverished single-parent households that never become two-parent households.
The welfare ``reform'' approved by President Clinton that will deny teen mothers Aid to Families with Dependent Children may reduce teen pregnancies a mite. But it does nothing to tidy the economic, cultural and moral disarray that make teen pregnancies so common.
Well-crafted, well-executed family-life curriculums diminish pregnancies and postpone sexual intercourse involving young people.
The most useful Father's Day gift today would be a national resolve to face up to the sexual exploitation of teen and preteen females by adult males and move on several fronts to lessen it. by CNB