There are many consequences of teen pregnancy, and I don’t think Bristol Palin is the proper person to be out there giving this message. In fact, I think she may be giving an entirely wrong message by being out there: The message that teen pregnancy can lead to a lucrative career. She hasn’t done anything as an individual but have a child, and her children are unlikely to grow up in the poverty that most children of teenage mothers do. What does she know about the difficulties of college life as a young mother? Does she have any wisdom, really, to share?
I had my first daughter one month after I turned seventeen; and I can tell you about the real life of a teenage mother and the consequences of teen pregnancy like poverty, abuse and how hard it is to get a college education once you end up being a young mother. If you really want someone to speak to the realities of the situation, you could pay me.
I married my first husband nine days after I turned sixteen. I got pregnant four months later, on purpose. I wanted to have a baby. Maybe it’s the hormone thing, but it is a feeling for many young women in this age group. I stayed married to him for twelve years, much too long, and the abuse started shortly after my daughter was born.
The United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births in the western industrialized world. Teen pregnancy costs the United States at least $7 billion annually.
Thirty-four percent of young women become pregnant at least once before they reach the age of 20 -- about 820,000 a year. Eight in ten of these teen pregnancies are unintended and 79 percent are to unmarried teens.
http://www.familyfirstaid.org/...
I tried to continue HS while I was pregnant. In Tucson, AZ, at that time, you had to go to pregnant girls school. They did not want you roaming the halls with big bellies infecting all the other girls. The school was located downtown in a fairly bad part of town, and I was the only pregnant girl who was married. I met a few girls who were having their second babies, and I met some as young as thirteen expecting. My health got worse, and the Doctors told me I would probably never carry the baby to term. I was put on home bound study, and since I was under eighteen, I had to have an adult there when the teachers came. I found a guy a friend was dating, and he was very kind to do this for me. He was an Air Force Fireman working at Davis Mothan AFB.
My daughter was born cesarean section, and since neither my husband or I were considered adults in the state of AZ, my parents had to wire their permission for the surgery from Las Vegas. They also had to give their permission for me to get a drivers license, which they would not do. I did not get one till i was nineteen.
That was my last sememster of real HS school, and I ended up getting my GED a year later. I enrolled at the U of A, and you had to have scores twice as high on your GED to be accepted. I was point two away from this score, so they let me retake one part of my test ( I chose math); and I raised my overall score two points and was accepted.
Going to college was another excuse for my husband to beat me. I met my best friend Leslie my first day of chemistry, we were both nursing students, and stayed life long friends. Leslie had two children, one daughter my daughter’s age, and a son a year older. She had recently separated from her husband and let me move in with her when the abuse got bad. Shortly before the end of the semester, my husband beat me bad enough that I was in emergency services on campus. I was down and despondent with no money and no support from him. I tried to kill myself a week before the end of the semester, and Leslie saved my life. (long story) I was out for three days, and when I woke up, went to take my finals the next day. I passed all my classes, except I had to drop chemistry.
Over the next few years, my husband and I kept getting back together and separating; and the abuse continued, actually getting worse, which is what usually happens. Poverty and the inability to support myself and my daughter kept me in a bad situation. I realized education was my only way out; and every chance I got I enrolled in college, wherever I was. By this time we were living in northern CA, and college tuition was free. I was excited. I started summer school, changing my major to computer science, a few months after having my second daughter, by c-section again. She was born eight years minus one week apart from my oldest. I thought my relationship was more stable then, but once again, after a baby and going back to college, the abuse started. I was full into spring semester, but dropped out and left him for good, going back to southern AZ and moving in Leslie’s house once again. She had just gotten married, and I moved in her house as she moved out.
Teenage Pregnancy Consequences
Teen mothers are less likely to complete high school (only one-third receive a high school diploma) and only 1.5% have a college degree by age 30. Teen mothers are more likely to end up on welfare (nearly 80 percent of unmarried teen mothers end up on welfare).
The children of teenage mothers have lower birth weights, are more likely to perform poorly in school, and are at greater risk of abuse and neglect.
The sons of teen mothers are 13 percent more likely to end up in prison while teen daughters are 22 percent more likely to become teen mothers themselves.
http://www.familyfirstaid.org/...
I always wanted to go to college, and this was my driving force wherever I was. I saw it as the only way I could ever be my own person, be proud of myself and support my children on my own.
I met my second husband through Leslie in Bisbee, AZ and moved in with him shortly after meeting; but we did not get married for three years. I had an opportunity to take nursing classes in a government program and get paid for it, so I did. Low income. The next sememster I again took computer classes; but had found my niche finally (I thought), and ended up getting my AA with high honors in Journalism from Cochise College in Douglas, AZ.
A year later I was accepted to NAU in Flagstaff, AZ; and my husband and I lived apart, my kids with me, while I went to school that year. It was a poor, hard time for my kids. It was not just me making sacrifices to go to school, but my children paid in many ways too. They did not get Christmas presents that year. I had rented a holey, I mean holes in the roof, cabin fifteen miles from NAU and spent a very cold, snowy winter, up at three AM feeding the fire, so my kids would not freeze to death. The wood I went out and got with a friend, because I did not have the money for propane. I had to have water delivered (as there is no underground water in Parks, AZ), and it was very expensive. This limited us to two baths each a week in just a couple of inches of water. My oldest daughter hated me this year. She was a junior in HS. By Nov I was out of money and food, and we spent the last month of the fall semester eating mostly rice. I had been writing news articles for both the Lumberjack, the NAU paper, and the Williams News, which was fifteen miles west of Parks, during this time, along with going to my classes. I was determined to make the most of my time at school and show my professors I was serious.
In December the roads were bad, we had huge snowstorms all semester, one after another; but I was on the road with my kids by 6:30 AM driving Janice to take her college SAT’s in town. We were the only ones braving the freeway, and a cop escorted us all the way to town.
My husband rented our house out, so he could come help the next semester; and we moved into a crummy trailer in town closer to college. We barely scraped through, but having Skip with us made it a little easier; and at the end of the year, I was awarded a scholarship that was paid for out of the professors' pockets in honor of the son of the head of our college who had committed suicide. I had to reluctantly turn it down and go back south; because our renters had not paid, and we were in danger of losing our house. I spent the next three years waitressing, and Janice graduated HS and went to the UofA in Tucson with several scholarships. I remember her words to me, “I’m not going to be like you mom.”
And she wasn’t. She got her double degree in astronomy and physics after four years at the UofA with no student loan debt. She was the only female to graduate with a major in physics that year. She ended up paying for my last year of college saying, “You will never be happy till you graduate.” She got her degree before I did. It took me seventeen years to get my degree in journalism ( I graduated magna cum laude); but during my last year I found my real love, the library. I don’t know why I never figured it out before; I had spent my life in the library. My favorite professor, Dr. Johnson, told us the average age of a library student was thirty seven. I was thirty seven. “I’m finally on time for something in my life,” I said, and everyone laughed.
I ended up going back to school the next few years to get my library and high school teaching certification. I taught three semesters of journalism, but most HS’s have phased out these programs. My love was the library, which is what I did the most. I am K-12 certified, so I worked with every age child and tried to instill in them a love of reading, which I believe can give you anything you want in life. I can say, both my children love to read as much as I do and are also spreading the love of reading to their children.
I am terribly proud of my children. Janice went on to her career with all her talents and has invented stuff on the International Space Station. Boeing bought her patents. She spent three years going to Italy to work on the node Harmony, which was added to the space station in Oct 2007, nine months after my husband died. She called me from Cape Canaveral the morning of the launch and sent me a postcard with the patch of the Harmony that was designed for the mission and all the astronauts names on it. She knows all the astronauts and has lived and worked in Huntsville, AL for many years. If you were to google her name, she would come up first for her work on the Harmony. The last several years she has been working on a very important project, traveling all over the country setting off rockets, to develop the next generation of rocket fuel. She has a daughter who is now seven; and even though Janice wasn’t a teenage mom, she has found that juggling a child and career has its own challenges, although she waited till the age of 32 before becoming a mother. Her husband works with robotics and AI at the U of AL.
My youngest daughter got her Masters in English from NAU, my alma mater, (we even took library classes and Shakespeare together, Dr. Johnson would call us the "dynamic duo"), and works for the city of Flagstaff. She has a young son who is type one diabetic and a beautiful daughter, so she has her own challenges. It is not easy to have a diabetic child and work all the time, which she has always done.
I love and am very proud of both my daughters. My kids turned out okay, but they still have resentments over how they were raised and the poverty in their lives. You can’t take back getting pregnant at sixteen. As for me I’m still poor, and I could really use twenty thousand dollars if you want someone to talk about teen pregnancy.