Teen pregnancy

“Everyone knows that young people today learn sex through pornographic sites, which out-rated Facebook in the number of downloads some four years ago.

Some 12 years ago, three girls from my scholarship program, aged 14, 16 and 17, got pregnant by midterm schooling. Dropping out of school was necessary and, I guess, pursuing the interrupted academic activity would no longer be possible because they, by accident, are now teen mothers.

Two of the girls had drug addicts as partners and the youngest had a “mangangalakal” (somebody who collects trash on the street with a “kariton” or cart) as the dad of her accidental offspring.

Queried about where the couple “did it” when they hardly fit in the shanties they dwell in, well, the casual answer was “right there in the cart” — one drizzling evening, as they covered themselves with a worn-out tarp.

A year ago, their daughter at aged 13 is now pregnant by another juvenile “mangangalakal.” Expect the same episodes to go on and on; indeed, it has become a cycle.

A recent survey puts the Philippines as topmost in the list of countries with the highest incidence of teenage pregnancies. Many of those are juveniles from the poorest sectors of society.

Teenage pregnancies, for the most part, is a stoke on the wheel of poverty and misery that has chronically defined the culture, including sexual, of the younger generation.

Laguna Rep. Sol Aragones says, “Teenage pregnancy perpetuates the cycle of poverty and inequality.”

Rightly indeed, but it is also the other way around, namely, the cycle of poverty causes teenagers to find ways to beat a miserable situation they were born into by engaging in the fleeting joys of peer pressure outside their homes and the pleasure of cheap drugs and, of course, uninhibited sex.

We can no longer blame the parents since they, too, have started blaming themselves. Young people today no longer see their parents and their homes as harbingers of controlling authority or at least of structures that would shape and build their lives.

Hence, the youth are in constant search of authorities or semblances of such either among peers or in the intimacies of youthful assurances that eventually end up in bed and unwanted pregnancies.

This is beside the fact that their fragile frame of body, mind and heart is exposed to countless undue influences of a juvenile sub-culture that bullies virgins, or frowns at conservative values about intimacies.

And what with advocacy groups that care more about the increase of population over the higher rate of teenage pregnancies and endorsing safe sex through condoms rather than addressing the problem holistically?

And like an old worn-out refrain, the proposed solution is sex education. But what genre of sex education are we hitting here, I suppose? As always, it would be about that “reproductive health” which has been used as a shield to hide the real agenda, which is birth control through contraceptives, including abortifacients by all means.

One United States research laboratory is coming out with a painless and non-invasive abortion!

How can a teenager survive the sub-culture streams of mental justifications that calls abortion a “choice,” or traditional sexual values as “hang-ups” or casual sex as “getting to know you,” or contraceptives as “safe sex”?

Besides, everyone knows that young people today learn “sex” through pornographic sites, which out-rated Facebook in the number of downloads some four years ago. A college survey among students revealed that 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have been exposed to pornographic content on the Internet before they reached the age of 18!

And what parent, school or church can stop the kids in viewing such in the privacy of their iPads, tablets or cell phones?

Teenage pregnancy is a symptom that the young people have been building a world of their own, a culture of their own and the mature are utterly helpless!