According to the Kaiser Family Trust's State Health Facts site, New Hampshire has only ("only?") 19.8 pregnancies per 1000 teens per year. Mississippi, meanwhile, has 65.7 per 1000.

Raw numbers like these are often complicated. And sometimes fairly finger-pointingly biased against teenagers themselves. And yeah, the bluer states do tend to have not just more responsible, better socialized children and better comprehensive sex education but also more access to birth control and abortion services. And yeah, the redder states tend to have less of all the above with the result that "pregnant teenagers" isn't all that correlated with teenagers having sex." Let alone "teenagers successfully communicating, setting and honoring boundaries, waiting till they're ready.

But still. Teens in New Hampshire and pretty much all of New England are drastically less likely to become pregnant than teens in the nominally more "religious" and "traditional-family-values" deep South. And I'm... pretty sure a county-by-county map of nominally middle-of-the-road states like California, Virginia, North Carolina, and my home state of Washington would show similar differences between progressive and conservative areas.

(Via Amy Lang)

Anna N of Jezebel, in a post on the general state of “men’s reproductive rights” activism, raises a persistent point that… I wonder… well, let’s go with the quote first

But sometimes it’s men who shut women out. In her thorough article for The Nation on reproductive coercion (which we’ve also discussed), Lynn Harris writes of “the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control.” She cites one study finding that 15% of sexually active young women who visited reproductive health clinics had suffered birth control sabotage by a partner, and another in which 26% of a sample of teens in abusive, sexually active relationships said their partners were “actively trying to get them pregnant.”

She said it here.

So…

I’m wondering…

Y’know how all those “pro-life” types will do just about anything to stop women from getting an abortion… or even avoiding pregnancy in the first place… except, y’know, make it actually safe, easy, inexpensive, and socially acceptable for women to, y’know, actually stay preganant, have, and raise their unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?

And how instead they try and make it, and keep it, as close to social, economic, moral, even corporal punishment as possible? How they present it as the ultimate in dependency? In sacrifice? In pain, and exhaustion, and tedium, and frustration, and helplessnes? In stigma? In shame?

So…

I’m wondering…

How much do you think all that plays into this notion of coerced pregnancy as intimate control (a.k.a. as a form of partner abuse?)

I mean…

Not to put too fine a point on it but it’s well within society’s capacity to make unplanned, unwanted children (if not pregnancy itself) not just not just not punishment, and not just easy, but downright enjoyable. In the grand scheme of things it involves beginning social investment in children’s lives just a few years earlier than we do now — call it 3-6 months before birth instead of 3-4 years after.

And it’s not like the returns on that social investment wouldn’t be appropriate — I mean, even after 18 years of exacting all those “wages of sin” from the mother on behalf of traditionalist/conservatives, those same children will spend somewhere between four and seven decades as real adults — equal with all other adults for responsibility for the world. To invest in children as future fellow citizens instead of present punishments for parents would be to reap fantastic benefits in the future.

And…

Finally…

Not to put too fine a point on it but just how enthused might callow youths be to sabotage their partners pills or to pinhole their condoms if the outcome was not lasting “who’ll love you now, bebbeh?” control but a little more respectability, more rather than less independence, and a whole lot more support?

I’m not saying let’s all go out and encourage teen pregnancy. I am, however, saying that to the extent society would like to avoid teen pregnancy and, especially to also avoid pregnancy terminations, the incentives are currently… perverse.

Summary: Are boyfriends really “most likely to disappear” when their partners become pregnant? Fact or cultural gender messaging? And who’s decision?

Echidne of the Snakes, while doing an otherwise pitch-perfect job of countering anti-choice slippery-slopery, hits one hypothetical that seems like it might be a flat note:

If she gets pregnant, the boyfriend most likely disappears…

She said it here.

Is this true? Are boyfriends most likely to disappear when their partner gets pregnant?

Just considering a second possiblity from the considerable range of reactions I’d think the boyfriend would be at least as likely to propose marriage as disappear.

Unless, of course, by “disappear” Echidne (who’s hypothetical involves underaged, underprivileged Salvadorians) means “murdered by the girl’s family members in an attempt to defend their family’s ‘honor.’” Which, come to think of it, maybe she does mean.

Based on my own peer-counseling experiences as a teenager in southern Appalachia before Roe v. Wade was handed down relationships involving pregnancy where generally much tighter between the boy and girl themselves than between their families. And when pregnancies were discovered it tended to be the families of both teens that created the separations. And enforced them. Against the wishes of either teenager.

Anyway, what’s your first, second or third-hand experience with this sort of thing? Are boys and/or men really “most likely to disappear when their partner gets pregnant?” I mean, maybe they are! Even though I don’t think so. I’m not going to trust my cultural messaging (which would be similar to Echidne’s) nor can I trust my own non-trivial but also not statistically significant anecdotal experience (which would be that disappearances aren’t “most likely” and when they do occur are often enforced rather than desired.) Instead I just really don’t know.

Which is why I’m asking.

—-

For the record the rest of Echidne’s post really is cool and well-worth a read.

Photo by Flickr user HoldThatTiger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, riffing off a public interview with Alaska Governor Palin’s minor daughter, points to the basic contradiction of “abstinence-only” marketing, especially as it’s presented to girls.

In other words, it’s “obvious” that you shouldn’t take the greatest step in your life that fills it with joy and perfection and bliss and did I say perfection?  Getting pregnant at 17 will complete you, girls, so don’t do it!  That trifling boyfriend of yours will, the second you get pregnant, become so devoted to you that he’ll tattoo your name on his finger, and your mother will give you a year to plan the perfect wedding you’ve been encouraged to dream about since you could first turn a page in a bridal magazine.  Having a baby in high school is so fucking great, so girls, don’t do it!

Pardon me if I find the whole situation disingenuous.

Read the quote in context here.

What’s weird about this whole business to me is that in terms of reproductive topography it’s not even a bad idea in social-theory terms to encourage young people to a) have their own children while their parents are still young enough to provide in-home support and assistance and b) parents are themselves still young enough when their children go off on their own (to grandparent their own children’s children part-time!) that, still in their own 30s, they can then launch full-blown and reproductively-unencumbered careers, lives, etc. As opposed to, say, getting up a full head of steam career-wise and then… interrupting it to go “nuclear” (family) in your 30s and then try and get back off the parent track it in your 40s or 50s (or 60s as will be the case for me!)

And not to put too fine a point on it, with such a model it really wouldn’t matter as much if one or the other parent was a massive flake or not long-term, grow-old-together compatible because… there’d still be plenty of close supporting infrastructure, not only for, say, the abandoned father but also the interested-in-resuming-dating daughter.

I’m not saying that’s the best model, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.** If that were the conservative model. Which it manifestly also isn’t.

Instead the model seems to be to trap children in these weird double-binds that result in a) high expectations, b) sense of personal failure, c) making poor interpersonal/partner choices that d) you’re then stuck with that result in…

e) What midwife and birth instructor Penny Simpkin rather hauntingly refers to as “the empty years” where, especially if you’re a “traditional” woman, your children are out of the home and you have, basically, nothing left to live for because all you were raised to believe in was being a stay-at-home mom or a work-yourself-to-death dad.

So, sort of like Marcotte, I’m thinking would be fine if they wanted to have it one way — teenagers really are fucked up by pregnancy if they’re not really ready — or fine the other — when you get pregnant we’ll lavish you with a wedding and tons of parental support. But trying to have it both ways — if you get pregnant you’re really fucked up but we’re going to lavish you with big wedding and tons of support — just… ruins it for everybody! The joy of sex. The joy of parenting. The joy of having a career. Even the joy of grandparenting!

[** It wouldn’t even be the end of the world population-increase-wise if everyone still limited themselves to two children. In fact as long as I’m speculating wildly I suspect a start-your-life-after-kids model would actually increase interest in smaller rather than larger families. —fl]