*this post is a work in progress; I have links to add and more points to make but right now my hands are shaky from hunger, and I have errands to run and children to dress. So if something looks outlandish and unsubstantiated, keep your pants on, chances are I have a link for that.*
Lilian queried in the comments to the last post:
And i'm going to try to answer this question, even though whenever I try I get bogged down in the hugeness of the issue. She specifically mentions the Gloucester teenagers. When that story broke I wrote feverishly for days and never posted anything, i was never able to express things to my satisfaction. Basically, I'm happy for them, I wish them the best, and I think that to band together that way was the smartest thing they could have done under the circumstances.
As for Bristol Palin, I hope she can get through this without too much damage from her mother's candidacy. And I wonder how much differently we''d be talking if Sarah Palin were a father instead of a mother, would be be faulting her "naked ambition"? Would we be scrutinizing her parenting choices so closely? (I'm not saying we shouldn't be, I'm just saying that when a father runs for office he should be suject to the same scruitny. Fathers are parents too.)
I'm not against teenage pregnancy, not even a little bit. I think it can be a good thing, a positive life choice for many women. With proper support, motherhood needn't end a woman's choices in life. Think about it: a woman has a child at 16. By the time she's 22, the child is in kindergarten and she can concentrate on college (if she hasn't finished already) and working. By the time she's in her late 30's that kid is out of her hair. Plenty of time for work and fun; boy and parties are not out of the question either. Notice, in this scenario, there's no halt in her career; "opting out" becomes irrelevant when the intensive phase of young childhood is already over.
The key phrase is "with proper support". Which means money, time, effort, and infrastructure not provided by the girls pushing out the babies. But providing that would condone the choices of these women: imagine a world that the only consequence for teenage motherhood is motherhood itself? I mean, isn't that enough?
I wish it were a real choice: "do I want to be a mother or not?"
instead of "Would becoming a mother destroy me? How much am I willing to sacrifice? Will that be enough?"
Instead, we withhold the village as punishment for her misbehavior, resign her to difficulty and poverty, and screw her kid(s) in the process. Now, I have no idea how to implement this in real life, but I do know that for policy and resource allocation to change, what first must change is our values as a society. Motherhood is valuable in all its forms, because these children are going to be the ones running the world someday, and we want them to be good people.
If motherhood is punitive it's because we've set up our society that way, not because teenagers are inherently bad mothers. Funny, that to become a mother without fear of shame you must wait until your body is much less able to recover from the punishing effects of pregnancy and childbirth. Motherhood gets you one way or another.
