You’ve got my vote…if, of course, you make it a fatal offense to ever play Dire Straits on the radio ever again.
we’d see the problems associated with single parenthood disipate.
A bigger check every month is never going to make up for little Johnny growing up without one of his parents. How about incentives for unmarried couples to get married and make a go of it for their kid’s sake? Bigass tax breaks, more help for education, etc.
5. Abandon the failed policy of abstinence only.
Yeah. Cause we all know that abstinence is getting kids pregnant right and left.
6. Provide medically accurate sexuality education that begins in kindergarten and continues in an age-appropriate manner through the 12th grade.
I have a 3 year old. She knows that babies grow in their mommy’s tummy. So far that’s all that has been discussed. When she asks for more info, she’ll get it.
If you want teachers to sit kids down and tell them how to put on a condom and how to masturbate with their boyfriend/girlfriend, I’m sure you’d have no objection to an in-depth unit on fetal development, too. The kids could learn all about when the baby’s heart starts beating (by the time the mother finds out she’s pregnant), how early brain waves are recorded (about 40 days), and see videos of 4-D ultrasounds. They can read about the new discovery that babies smile and cry in the womb and they could be taught about how “viability” has gotten earlier and earlier over the years. This is in the name of medically accurate sex education, after all.
Or we could just leave it up to the parents to decide what they want their children to learn, and when they want them to learn it 
7. Provide easy and confidential access to family planning services through clinics, school-linked health centers, and condom availability programs.
We already have that. With a 33% illegitimacy rate, doesn’t seem to be working.
8. Publicly fund contraceptive services for low income teens.
Ever heard of the Health Department?
Well, there’s always #9:
1420’s style chastity belts. Get Britney Spears and Hilliary Duff to wear them while in front of a camera, and all the kids will want them…
Actually, it was probably more of an assertion. But I can easily back up a correlation between single-mother families and poverty. We can start with CBPP’s Poverty Trends for Families Headed by Working Single Mothers, 1993 to 1999, which concludes a 33.5% poverty rate for single mothers in 1999 versus 10.6% for other families (neither figure allowing for government assistance). It’s a good study.
Being an illegal Latino immigrant is positively associated with poverty. Would you like me to back that up, or will you accept it on the surface?
Anecdotal assertion. NM has a large percentage of its population under the age of majority. Also anecdotally, young marriages and pregnancies are more common in a) rural areas, with which NM is rife and b) Catholic Latinos. Again, it’s anecdotal.
Anecdotal assertion drawing from above.
Machismo is impossible to quantify, or really to qualify, of course. But a culture that prizes manhood, masculinity, and virility will IMO result in more young pregnancies. Young men out to prove their manhood are much more interested in getting some than in protection in all cultures. And, unfortunately, not all of those “men” will stick around.
That’s as much support for my opinion as I think I can reasonably provide off the top of my head. I’m not going to claim my opinion is correct, or that it’s supportable. (In the interests of full disclosure, I grew up in Albuquerque, both in the heights and in the South Valley.)
Ben ditto!
I grew up in the South Valley myself.
I guess I was wondering if you really knew what you were talking about, it seems like you do.
Machismo is more about a man being in charge as I understand it (we deal with this alot where I work). That has good and bad aspects. It leads to a man being fiscally responsible and powerfully stabilizing to his family. It also leads to inflexibility, often the pressures of which lead to feelings of martyrdom and subsequently drinking too much, withdrawal from family, and violence at times. A macho man is more likely to want to be in charge and control a situation, dominate. That would mean marriage, working to be the pillar of his family. I think Machismo has gotten a bad rap like many things that are misuderstood for their negative aspects but not their positive. Like guns, and political correctness; machismo has been so negativized that we’ve forgotten how to use it as a tool.
Teens are horny whether they are macho or not.
Poverty is associated with pregnancy out of wedlock, being an illegal immigrant is associated with poverty, but from that, you can’t draw the conclusion logically that illegal immigrants get pregnant out of wedlock more.
In other words, just cause A=B sometimes and B=C sometimes doesn’t mean that A=C at all.
Not that I’m not open to the notion that there exists a high percentage of young illegal immigrants breeding out of wedlock though.
I wonder what the breakdown is by generation of naturalization. My guess would be that there would be a higher percentage of second generation immigrants (children raised by first generation immigrants) pregnant due to the factors below plus difficulties of the parents raising children while working two jobs and not being able to rely on their culture to direct their children when they’re not around.
I thought about this quite a bit. I’d go: catholicism (no birth control) + poor communication about sex at home (no talking about it, no birth control) + catholicism (no abortions) + a strong tradition of family as existential definition (so, you’re somebody when you’re a member of a family, and even more so when you’re a mother) as opposed to one’s career + the fact that Hispanic People from New Mexico are really good looking and we can’t keep our hands off each other.
Consider it done!
funny, I misread that as “fetal offense”…
“Fetal Offense”…
which would also make a …
“There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents”. (Leon Yankwich).
I work in a school, and I see little difference in the hardship faced by “illegitimate” children with single mothers, and the children of divorced single mothers. Likewise some children who’s parents are not technically married turn out just fine provided the father is supportive. Is the OP lamenting the immorality of out-of-wedlock births, the social cost of single parenthood, or both.
Also, while there are racial/ethnic overtones, I think this is about the same for Hispanic or Indian (they are a big part of New Mexico’s population too) as it is for inner city blacks or rural whites. I suppose since the minorities tend to be clustered we tend to see the effects on those areas more. If you add that to other factors like language skills or alcoholism, it compunds the situation in New Mexico. I am pretty sure across the board, the number of children who have a single parent at some point in their upbringing is around 50% now.
As a side note, I think the term “machismo” is a little misunderstood. For a lot of people it conjures up stereotypical images of guys with mustaches beating their girlfriends for looking at other guys while screwing every woman they can otherwise.
Machismo frankly does involve being seen as virile, and that may include fathering children (especially sons). But a man who cannot support his own children or has them depend only on their mother is not a real “macho” either - or at least that’s how it used to be. A “macho” supposedly takes good care of his household and woman…or women. Sure its very chauvinist, but its rather confusing to decry the loss of traditional values while criticizing them at the same time.
Last time I looked at teen pregnancy stats, most of the fathers were not teens; most were 20 or older. Since it is illegal for them to have sex with teens, perhaps we should look more closely at enforcing that law. If a 20 or 30 something could reasonably expect legal troubles for having sex with a minor, then maybe they would think twice about it.
There was a letter to an advice columnist this week from parents concerned that their teen,when she turned 18, would run off with a much older man who had been persuing her. The columnist had to point out what he was doing now was quite illegal and they should alert the police.
Maybe we should see what we as a society could do to lift single women out of poverty. Equal pay, better public education, job training up to and including 4 year degrees for women that apply themselves but don’t have the money. I know a single mom (divorced an abusive husband) that managed to get a two year degree while on public aid and managed to get a good job because of that degree, and is no longer in poverty. She was able to do that because of a public aid program that is no longer funded despite the fact that most women on it used it to permanently get off of welfare.
Maybe we could provide affordable health care to everyone. I have known women that wait until after they give birth to get married. You see, they were in love with men they wanted to marry, but since they and their SO worked multple minimum wage jobs, they would not have qualified for medicaid if they got married and their jobs did not get them health insurance. So they waited so that they could get some prenatal care and have their birth in a hospital paid for by medic aid. When the babies were doing well, they got married. In at least one case that I know, they worked themselves out to poverty, but had they needed to pay for the birth, they would still be poor.
I have known women that wait until after they give birth to get married. You see, they were in love with men they wanted to marry, but since they and their SO worked multple minimum wage jobs, they would not have qualified for medicaid if they got married and their jobs did not get them health insurance. So they waited so that they could get some prenatal care and have their birth in a hospital paid for by medic aid.
Yep. Happens all the time here.
Back when my mom was a social worker (in the 70s in KY), she’d have poor married women come in and say they were “separated.” The husband was still living with them but unless he was out of the house, they couldn’t get any help at all. The social workers would turn a blind eye and hook them up anyway because they all knew what a stupid rule that was.
I agree with all of the above, although I wouldn’t limit the publicly funded contraceptive services to teens; I’d provide them for all ages.
IMO, when young people reach the point in their development at which sexual experimentation could result in pregnancy, they need to already know how to avoid that result. They need to have already had good contraception education. And they need easy, confidential acess to contraception.