Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005140194
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"I've been watching our [pregnancy] rates go up for 20 years with a sinking feeling," Grant said. `All the usual things - family-planning counseling, adolescent caseworkers - have not been able to budge the rate."
Three years ago, Planned Parenthood officials came up with another crackpot idea to reduce teen-age pregnancies. They conducted a campaign on Baltimore television and in ads on the sides of city buses that asked, "What's an orgy?" The stated purpose was to encourage parents to discuss sex with their children to reduce the number of teen pregnancies.
It didn't work. More than 11 percent of Baltimore girls between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant, the highest rate in Maryland. The proposal by Grant won't work either, because it fails to address why younger and younger teen-age girls have sex and become pregnant.
Notice that the girls will not be paid to remain chaste, only to avoid one of the consequences of premarital sex. Already the program is doomed because it does not get to the heart of why teen-agers engage in sex at ever earlier ages.
Psychiatrist Walter Byrd of the Minirth-Meier-Byrd Clinic in Fairfax, says, "When families erode and values become relative and not absolute, children must go deeper into their personality hope chests to find something to exchange for affection. They want to connect with the opposite sex at earlier ages because they see no continuity to life and mostly broken relationships, which include mom and dad."
A recent New York Times story seems to confirm Byrd's analysis. It reported a growing number of 10-year-olds who are pressuring their parents to allow them to date.
Byrd believes that "paying children not to get pregnant is like admitting them free to a ballpark and then paying them not to watch the game."
The Baltimore Sun quoted "officials involved in family planning issues" in Maryland as saying, "No one really knows what will work [in reducing teen-age pregnancies], so anything - even paying to entice cooperation - is worth considering."
The tragedy is that we do know what works, but we have refused to apply it. Our government has systematically excluded from the public schools the Ten Commandments, along with any concept of God and the self-esteem that comes from knowing that one is loved by the Creator of the universe. Children turn to sex believing that the messages they receive from their music, movies and television represent the only reality.
The Chesapeake school system is trying to return to a standard of values that has worked in the past. Officials have been distributing a classroom brochure that tries to promote chastity as the best means of avoiding the consequences of unmarried sex.
The brochure says, "God has given each person a priceless gift, but many people carelessly give it away." The brochure tells students it is their personal responsibility to abstain from premarital sex. The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to sue to have the brochure removed because it mentions God.
Chesapeake School Board Chairman William Spradlin probably spoke for most parents when he said, "Isn't it terrible when you attempt to teach what's right and what's wrong, and another group takes a stance that you can't tell us what's right and wrong?"
It is, indeed. This reluctance to "impose morality" has left America with imposed immorality and precisely the social ills we now universally decry. It is this refusal to teach right from wrong that has led to so many teen-age pregnancies, so many divorces, so much drug abuse, a pornography explosion and a soaring crime rate.
People can't catch values and morals the way they catch a cold. If we must train dogs to behave, what makes us think humans will learn culturally desirable behavior on their own? "We have made men without chests," said C.S. Lewis. "We've removed the organ, but demand the function."
Paying some Maryland girls not to get pregnant won't solve their problems or ours. Giving them something to live for, and the self-esteem that goes with it, will. Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB