Toughest Course A Student Can Face

At 15, she was already a knockout. Her flashing dark brown eyes and long, lustrous hair hid a girl who had no idea how attractive she was.

She slouched against a door frame at my home while we talked. She didn’t say anything important, just chitchat to kill time.

I remember thinking how far in life she could go. She was smart, personable and remarkably mature.

That was a year ago. Sometime in the intervening 12 months, she met an older man. The rest of the story is predictable. Though she knew he had three illegitimate children by three other women, she was determined to win his heart for herself.

The girl who loved too much is now pregnant.

The 21-year-old father says he wants to be there for her, but he isn’t around, financially or emotionally, for the other three babies or their mothers. Father’s Day means nothing to him.

The elated mother-to-be spends all her time reveling in her gift for him. Her parents, meanwhile, worry. Their gorgeous daughter’s dream of a career is dying as a new life steals it away, day by day.

They wonder, where did she get the idea that having a baby was easy and socially acceptable? How will she finish high school, with an infant to tend, let alone find something more for herself?

She’s not worried. She already knows all the answers:

She’ll keep going to classes just like before. All the pregnant girls do.

Once she has the baby, she’ll go to school while the baby stays in the day-care center her high school provides for teen parents.

Money isn’t a problem because she can sign up for welfare to get food for her baby, medical care and anything else she needs.

How does she know?

Her teachers told her.

What started out as sex education in the classroom has turned into prenatal care and day care in the schoolhouse.

It’s a mixed message we send to teens. On the one hand, teachers tell them to wait for sex, but if they don’t, that’s no problem. The schools accommodate pregnant girls and babies.

What’s happened is that we as a society have legitimized illegitimacy. And the kids know it.

According to Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern Arizona, 36 teens become pregnant every day in Arizona. Only 2 percent of these babies find their ways into adoptive families. The rest are usually raised by their young mothers, without the dad’s help or money. The majority end up on welfare at one time or another, a costly proposition for taxpayers.

And we all know what this means for the babies: less education, less opportunity, less success. Less of everything.

And for their mothers? The same. But less.

This isn’t an easy road these sexually active kids walk. The decisions they make in a hormonal state affect them, and everyone around them, for the rest of their lives. Something that liberals didn’t count on when they pushed sex education into the classroom was that oversexed kids would interpret information about reproduction as a tacit how-to lesson. If a teacher, a role model, can talk about “It” in the classroom, then doing “It” must be OK, even if the teacher says it’s better to wait.

Eight months from now, the little girl who loved too much will have a new baby to call her own. And with lots of hard work, she might graduate from high school in a year or so. That’s if she can handle working part time, attending classes full time and raising an infant all the time.

But she’s not worried. It won’t be hard. At least that’s what she thought she heard her teachers say.

xxxx