Seventeen pregnant girls at Gloucester High: SOS, Texas CPS!
Where’s CPS when we really need ‘em? This from Time:
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason . . .
By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse.
Huh? How could it get any worse?
“We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.
Oh, really! So it’s the homeless guy that’s the problem. Silly me. Drunk teen fathers are vastly preferred in Gloucester, I guess. Does the principal have something against homeless men? Aren’t they entitled to a little happiness, too?
But it gets better. Turns out the Gloucester High School encourages teens to get pregnant. It’s what Texas CPS “investigator” Angie Voss would call a “pervasive environment of sexual abuse.” Oh, what was it that the FLDS were accused of in Texas? Hmm. I’m wracking my brain, here:
The girls who made the pregnancy pact—some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers—declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. . .
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Isn’t this sweet! High fives and baby showers. A largely Catholic community in Massachusetts encourages all their teens to have babies out of wedlock and they get fawning, sympathetic coverage in Time. An FLDS community encourages a few of theirs to have babies within a lasting family relationship and the government of Texas steals their brood to the thunderous applause of media left, right and center. What a country!
10 comments
I think our society has multiple personality disorder. Unwed pregnancies for high schoolers in a non-religious setting, no problem. Young women commiting to marriage and motherhood as the highest possible achievement in a religious centered life, that’s just too bizarre and shouldn’t be allowed. We must rescue these poor victims from their sick oppressive culture and reprogram them to think for themselves. Right.
Incidentally, Kurt, I read your op-ed at gosangelo. Nice job.
What the Gloucester High incident powerfully demonstrates is that the teen pregnancies at YFZ Ranch were not the object of the CPS raid. Smashing a religion was.
How much worse was it, really, when Hester was branded with a letter A for Adulteress? Such harsh treatment for sexual promiscuity, real or imagined, is cruel, and no one not Muslim would advocate that today (and of course, they would just go for an honor killing and get it over with.)
But some form of disapproval for immorality seems necessary to preserve the traditional family and thereby the whole of society. No culture survives long when promiscuity becomes widespread. There is a tipping point, and it appears we have arrived there.
A healthy balance is hard to maintain. But when we tip the scale in favor of promiscuity, as Gloucester High has done, and when mushy minds host baby showers for unwed mothers, giving tacit approval to those raising children this way, we have gone to another unhealthy extreme. It is time we think more, contrary to Michelle Obama’s advice to Barack, and feel less.
April38, you are right about the dishonor killings. If anything of this sort happened in the dishonor killing zone, few of those fetuses would see the light of day because their mothers would be summarily executed prior to birth day.
Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
“Reclaiming Honor in Jordan”
http://www.redroom.com/author/ellen-r-sheeley
I believe Roy is a robot, programmed to write a version of the above passage on every single blog mentioning this story. That, or he’s the 24-year-old homeless guy who knocked up one of those girls.
This Glouscester High School teen pregnancy pact sure sounds like your typical “self-destructive” behavior seen by young people as a society becomes more of a social state and less is expected of them by society. These kids all know that the government will pay for all the costs of their pregnancies and their baby’s care till the babies grow up at age 18. You see, these kids really don’t see any consequences to having a baby. Call it a tragedy, but I live in New Orleans, and very few pregnant mothers get married down here (even when they live with the father) because they’ll lose their government benefits. The liberals WANT a dependent citizenry so they just give out the checks. No questions asked. If you don’t believe me, then ask ANYONE from New Orleans about the “baby mama scam!”
Why are these girls being punished?
In a March fundraiser, Barack Obama excoriated abstinence-only education with harsh language. “Look, I got two daughters – nine years old and six years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
They just made some mistakes!!! Call Gloucester Planned Parenthood and tell them to plan to work late this week.
Babies are not mistakes, Barack, and in case you missed it (we know you did) actions have consequences. Abortion is NOT a satisfactory alternative to abstention or even to inadequate birth control measures.
But you think so — to to extent of refusing to even allowing a measure on the floor of the Illinois state senate that would protect the lives of babies who survive abortions. “Let them die” is his credo, let them expire on a shelf, unattended and uncomforted.
Illinois finally got a statute on the books only AFTER the Obamination was promoted to the U. S. Senate.
Wow! I didn’t know that Senator Obama was so heartless, the media makes him look like a pussycat!
He’s no pussycat. He campaigned (see the archives of iperceive.net) in Kenya in 2007 for his Muslim-terrorist cousin Odinga, who, with Obama’s half-brother Roy Obama, was party to burning unarmed Christian opponents alive in churches where they had taken refuge from their henchmen. The documentation is all there. Hundreds of Kenya Christians died at the hands of Obama kinsmen. As noted above, Barack supported these terrorists by campaigning in person for them.
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