Quote:
Originally Posted by dragon wench  Quite often I will take the bus into town, and guaranteed, I will always see at least one girl no older than about 16 who is either pregnant or has a small child with her. Sometimes she will be even younger..sometimes she'll be both pregnant and have the small child...
What baffles me is why on earth these kids are not using contraception... |
Maybe some of them get pregnant deliberately. For over twenty years, I've been hearing that many teenage girls from low-income families WANT to have children of their own, especially if they grew up in a single-parent household and their own mother was a teenage mother. (Bill Moyers did a TV documentary that covered such topics back in the 1980s.) In that sort of social setting, a lot of young men in their twenties socialize with teenage girls, and conversely, a lot of teenage girls socialize with young men in their twenties, which results in lots of sexual activity and a relatively high rate of pregnancy compared to those who grow up in "traditional" families. Teenagers growing up in "traditional" families tend to be less sexually active and they don't intend to get pregnant, so it's only natural that they have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy, but you shouldn't think that is always the norm.
Here in the United States, the old welfare system gets a bad rap for encouraging such behavior, and you can't talk about the government's response to teenage pregnancy without getting into some very contentious arguments. Convervatives blame the "welfare state" for discouraging marriage while simultaneously encouraging procreation, and for a creating a situation in which young men didn't take precautions against impregnating young women because they didn't have to worry about any financial obligations to their children. I have no idea if anything like that applies in Canada.