Something special
Anti-abortion Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert has said that her 17-year-old son will make her a grandmother in April.
Isn’t that sweet. She had a baby when she was a teenager and now her son is following her lead.
“There’s something special about rural conservative communities,” Boebert continued. “They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they’re the same, [in] rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas. Teen moms’ rates are higher in rural conservative areas, because they understand the preciousness of a life that it’s about to be born.”
Or they’re lower in urban areas because people with better access to schools and libraries and higher education understand that teenagers don’t make the best parents.
A 2019 study published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) suggested that teen birth rates in rural areas might be higher than in urban areas because teens might be vulnerable to “local conditions that limit unintended pregnancy management options.” Teens living in rural areas often face large geographical barriers to access abortion providers—a difficulty that’s been exacerbated by a proliferation of abortion bans in Republican-led states.
Also teenagers living in rural areas often have parents like Lauren Boebert.
The CDC also reports the impact that teen pregnancies have on the girls’ lives: only 50 percent of teen mothers receive a high school diploma before the age of 22. Among women who don’t give birth in their teens, this number goes up to 90 percent. A 2008 study mentioned by the CDC also studied the impact of teen pregnancies on the children.
The offspring of teen moms are more likely to have lower school achievement or drop out of school; have more health problems; be incarcerated in their teens; and give birth as teenagers themselves.
Like Lauren Boebert’s son’s babymama.
Boebert was a teen mom herself and had to drop out of high school because of her pregnancy.
And she’s never caught up.
Also rural areas have fewer abortion clinics and laws that make it really difficult to get an abortion, especially if you’re young.
I wonderr if she browbeat her son about having “Democrat Commie Morals.”
Sarah Palin was the Republican V.P. nominee in 2008. During the campaign, her (then teen-age, then unmarried) daughter got pregnant. When the question of abortion came up, Palin proudly announced that that was her daughter’s decision, and that her daughter had made the “right” decision.
Her daughter may well have wanted the child, and for all I know that was a good decision for her. But I’m hard pressed to believe that she had a free choice in the matter.
Can you imagine the fuss if one of Obama’s unmarried daughters got pregnant while he was in office? Or probably even now, if they’re still unmarried. I don’t follow royalty much, and continuing to keep up with things like that feels too much like following royalty.
After remarrying and moving to the South, I acquired an extended family with a fair number of rural conservative people. The number of women I knew who became mothers before the ago of 20 went up significantly, as did the number of families with three or more kids, and the number who had unplanned babies. It’s always a delicate conversation (with close family members, not the people directly involved) when I wonder why so-and-so (and her male partner, usually) disrupted their lives so much by going through with an unplanned pregnancy when they have the possibility of terminating it; the conversation wondering about contraception is almost as delicate. I mean, I understand in an academic way how people are this way, but it’s a manner of thinking quite different from mine.
Sackbut, the son of a friend got young women pregnant four times over a 3 year stretch. One woman twice. He didn’t use condoms because ‘spoilt the mood’* and the women didn’t use the pill because ‘poison’, and anything else apparently never crossed their minds. Abortion was the go to. I don’t think, based on the published numbers that is a normal way of thinking here at all, but clearly held for a sub group of young people.
More to the point, I shake my head when I hear people sneer at certain races/religions that lean into ‘fate’, when so many white Christians talk about leaving things to the ‘will of God’. Yeah, right. We call those people parents. And delusional.
* He wasn’t a father at that stage, so didn’t realise that nothing kills the mood more than a screaming colicky baby and an overtired mother.