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Exceedingly stupid anti-teenage-pregnancy tactic...

FollowingHim

FollowingHim

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If you got a teenage girl, showed her videos of teenage mothers talking about their experiences, and then sent her home with a very lifelike baby doll to care for for the weekend, that actually cried and needed frequent care, would she be more or less likely to go and get pregnant?

The answer, I would have thought, would be pretty obvious. Women are clucky, they love babies, the more you encourage them the more they'll want them, right?

The people who design teenage pregnancy programs in schools however don't seem to have the slightest basic knowledge of how the female mind actually works. Check out this from the BBC today:
Concerns raised over teenage pregnancy "magic dolls"
Teenage pregnancy prevention programmes which use "magic dolls" to simulate the needs of a new baby do not work, according to a study in The Lancet. More than 1,000 teenage girls who took part in programmes in Western Australia were more likely to become pregnant than girls who did not take part, researchers found.

The baby simulator cries when it needs to be fed, burped or changed. Similar programmes are used in schools in 89 countries, including the US.

Girls enrolled in the Virtual Infant Parenting programme in more than 50 schools in Western Australia were taught about sexual health, contraception and the financial costs of having a baby. The programme also included watching a video of teenage mothers talking about their experiences and caring for a lifelike model of a baby over the weekend.

But when the girls were tracked up to the age of 20, 8% had given birth at least once and 9% had had an abortion. This compared to a figure of 4% giving birth among girls who did not take part in the baby simulator programme and 6% having an abortion.
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Well, that was predictable. But what do these researcher's think went wrong?
  • It didn't focus on fathers, or teenage boys, who have an equal part to play in early pregnancies
  • Secondary school age is too late to start educating vulnerable children about teenage pregnancy prevention
  • The programme didn't emphasise the negatives of being a teenage parent enough
  • A simulator cannot really convey what looking after a real baby is like
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Which completely misses the point.

The fundamental problem is that our society today thinks that children are bad. It sees only the negative side of children - the hard work. But in reality, children are a blessing. We have been designed by YHWH to want to have children, because they are GOOD. Sure there is hard work, but that's nothing compared to how wonderful the child actually is. And all these young women actually know this instinctively. They're too young to have become influenced by our feminist culture to turn too negative about kids, they mainly see how cute and wonderful they are, because their instincts are closer to what YHWH has actually designed. Show them babies, and they want their own babies. Take a baby to an event with lots of people and just watch how the teenage girls swarm around you.

Western society is stupid. And some of the stupidest elements of it appear to be in charge of the education system.
 
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Very interesting effect on the abortion rate though. Because the absolute number of pregnancies increased, the absolute number of abortions increased also, so more babies died as a result of these programs. So keep this next comment in that context.

However, checking the actual pregnancy numbers in the paper abstract and doing some further calculations, assuming each woman had only one pregnancy which either ended in birth or abortion, of the women who did get pregnant:
- With the programme, 113 / 210 babies were aborted, ie 54%
- Without the programme, 101 / 168 babies were aborted, ie 60%

I have no idea if this was statistically significant or not. However it does appear that the programme MAY have slightly reduced the abortion rate. In other words, the women who had more exposure to babies (videos of teenage mothers, taking a baby doll home etc), when they did get pregnant, were more likely to actually keep the baby. The natural female instincts that were stimulated by the programme made women more likely to get pregnant AND more likely to keep the baby if they did get pregnant.

Which just reinforces that the entire result is explainable simply by the programme making women more clucky.
 
I am reading (well, listening to) a book right now titled, "The Rise and Fall of Nations". One of the things he talks about in this book is how birth rate is a predictor of future success of a country because if it is too low, you don't have enough people to do the work, and if it is too high, you may not be able to support everyone. My own thoughts on some of that aside, the interesting point was little more than a cursory mention in the book. He made a point to share how countries can edit their sex education programs to either encourage or discourage pregnancy so they can influence the future economics of the country. He didn't indicate all countries do this, but he did specify one such case (I can't remember the country).

Point being, if you didn't have enough reasons to disklike sex education programs, now you can also add to the list that the data they present may be total bunk and only there to encourage or discourage pregnancy.
 
In my high school the girls who took that class were given chicken eggs to protect rather than dolls. Maybe the egg approach works as intended, I don't know, but it seemed to at least emphasize dull responsibility more than a gee-whiz techno-doll would.

I'd taken these programs more or less for granted 'til now. So much to unlearn! Thanks for posting that, Samuel.
 
We had sacks of flour and even the boys had to carry them around. It was ridiculous. Lol.
 
I didn't need any of that. I was 10 when my little brother was born, by the time I was in HS I had already changed 1 million diapers. Plus he got stuck in my room and crawled into my bed as soon as he could manage the ladder to my bunk.

I've never been peed on by a sack of flour...
 
I think the more you talk about it the more the kids will see it as an option, not everybody of course, but i think the programs will get some over the line to actually want a baby. Maybe the girls think it is cool and mature? I do not know, but i do know that when i was a teenager we wanted what we saw others had (simly said). Show them others have babies and there will be kids who want it too.

In my school there was no program like the ones described above. We got the basics of sex explained and we learned that it was possible to get all kinds of scary diseases. We were not expected to imagine to have kids, and so nobody would ever think it was an option.

Of course times have changed and now 8 yr old kids know more than the average married couple. :eek:

I think it is much better to teach children the social and emotional skills needed for a marriage and develop skills to find the right partner and teach them to wait till marriage with all the intimate stuff.
 
mystic said:
In my high school the girls who took that class were given chicken eggs to protect rather than dolls.
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We did this too (boys and girls) but it was in primary school (age 9-10). Of course my first thought as a 9 year old girl was to make it a lovely room in the shoe box I was given to care for it in. It had pretty wallpaper, a picture on the wall, little drawers for it's clothes, and a beautiful bed. I even made it several sets of clothes out of tissue paper. What I didn't consider was how it was an egg and would roll around and break....
Egg #2 worked much better once I removed all of the decoration and just added tissue paper. I still left her dress on though.
At that age I was insanely clucky already and my goals in life were to be a wife and mother. The egg idea was the same really as having one of my dolls that I played with regularly, no different. But if you'd given me a doll that was like an actual baby? Now, that would've made my world! Lack of sleep and changing nappies would've made no difference to me, I would've wanted to keep the doll/baby and been even more focused on having my own babies.
And this was before I had even gone through puberty and was actually old enough to consider this as possible for myself.
 
I never had to care for an egg. My experience of sex ed was a woman who dressed like she'd been found on a street corner teaching about contraception and STDs, and flat-out lying to the class about basic scientific facts. I was a stubborn science nerd. She told the class you couldn't get HPV through a condom. I stood up and told her of course not, but you caught it around the condom because it affected the entire genital area. She stubbornly kept repeating that you couldn't catch it through a condom. After the class I challenged her about it again, and she admitted I was right - but only admitted that to me in private, not to the class.

Sex ed was a farce designed to get kids interested in sex and hand out free condoms that they now thought "well I've got this, I suppose I better try it out"... Sex ed classes are fundamentally evil and entirely designed to achieve the exact opposite of what they are claimed to be about. But I find this spectacular failure rather amusing.
 
FollowingHim said:
Sex ed was a farce designed to get kids interested in sex. ... Sex ed classes are fundamentally evil and entirely designed to achieve the exact opposite of what they are claimed to be about.
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I think it is terribly sad. really really sad. But what is it about? Selling condoms and "selling" abortions? They want family planning, and kids having sex already? I really don't understand the point. Anyone has thought on this?
 
They want to destroy marriages and families before they happen. If they can get kids to have sex with no intention of staying together they can start diluting the glue that cements marriages together.

Satan hates marriage almost as much as he hates women.

I however love thus term "clucky" and am officially importing it to America.
 
Our daughter was 13 when our youngest son was born. He was about 2 or 3 months old when she told me she wanted to find someone to have sex with so she could have a baby who would always love her. I started making her do every diaper change and sit still for every feeding. I didn't even have to wake her up at night. By the end of a week she was sure she wasn't ready yet.

All that to say, yes put teen girls and babies together and the girls are going to want babies.
 
ZecAustin said:
They want to destroy marriages and families before they happen. If they can get kids to have sex with no intention of staying together they can start diluting the glue that cements marriages together.

Satan hates marriage almost as much as he hates women.
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I realise now that the meaning of sex has changed with time. Now it is promoted as something that has to do with nothing more than just lust. And most wil believe it. Yes, we should not underestimate satan.
 
Sex ed was a farce designed to get kids interested in sex and hand out free condoms that they now thought "well I've got this, I suppose I better try it out"... Sex ed classes are fundamentally evil and entirely designed to achieve the exact opposite of what they are claimed to be about. But I find this spectacular failure rather amusing.
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I don't think this is true at all. Here in California, sex ed is included as part of a mandatory health ed class. They are taught how the various biological systems work, the negative effects of drug use, etc. They don't get free condoms. We do use the doll simulator, but the reaction from my three daughters was that it was just annoying, and didn't have any effect on their desire to have or not have children, or to have or not have sex. It only gave them information that they may or may not use when they finally get into various situations later in life.

I don't find this idea very credible, that if you educate young adults (after puberty, they aren't children anymore) that they are then influenced to do an activity more. It's like saying if you educate people about first aid and hospitals, they will then be influenced to go out and drive dangerously.

The real cause of teen pregnancy is the widespread abdication of parental responsibility to teach their offspring the relationship of cause (you have sex) and effect (you can get pregnant), along with realistic, credible reasons why waiting for marriage has value, reinforced by irresponsible messages from our culture (movies, advertising, peer pressure, etc). California's sex ed happens in the first year of high school (age 13-14), which is years after the age parents ought to have taught their kids sex ed (along with how to be responsible with this knowledge), so the State's program exists mostly to catch those kids whose parents haven't done their job.

To be fair, we may "compare and contrast" what California does with what others do. For instance, many places (Texas, for instance) has "abstinence-only" sex ed, often taught by local religious leaders who seem to have forgotten what it was like to be young, and what wild teen hormones are capable of. They seem to think ignorance will function in place of birth control, and not surprisingly their teen pregnancy rate is much higher than California's. At least in California, we don't have girls claiming they don't know how they got pregnant because "sure we had sex, but we never kissed".

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” - Milton Friedman
 
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Jeff Ray said:
The real cause of teen pregnancy is the widespread abdication of parental responsibility to teach their offspring the relationship of cause (you have sex) and effect (you can get pregnant), along with realistic, credible reasons why waiting for marriage has value, reinforced by irresponsible messages from our culture (movies, advertising, peer pressure, etc). California's sex ed happens in the first year of high school (age 13-14), which is years after the age parents ought to have taught their kids sex ed (along with how to be responsible with this knowledge), so the State's program exists mostly to catch those kids whose parents haven't done their job.
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This is a key point I think. Sex Ed programs will differ from place to place but these days especially kids will know about sex long before these classes pop up, and the messages that the world is preaching will be taught to them long before these classes happen.

Additionally, this is one case where "buy in" is vital. A kid may do their homework or not underage drink simply because they're an obedient child and their parents tell them too, but those hormones are strooooooong. Great points there Jeff!
 
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