Week Eight Blog Post

   Watching 16 and Pregnant and Gloucester 18 brought back a lot of memories from when I was in high school and everyone in my high school was getting pregnant. During my senior year of high school two girls from my friend group became pregnant, and a total of twelve other girls in various grades also came out as pregnant. My mother works as a nurse for the OBGYN that took the majority of these girls on as patients. My mom would joke that their staff seriously considered putting their practices business card in the front office of our high school, because there were so many pregnancies. I couldn't believe how many girls were getting pregnant at sixteen and younger, I just didn't understand what was so difficult about using contraception. Now that I am a little bit older and more educated on this issue, I can see how some girls would fail to make contraception a top priority on their list.
   Comparing Gloucester 18 and 16 and Pregnant I really didn't find a lot of differences in the teens stories, in fact I found a similar pattern with these different young mothers. Many of the girls that became pregnant came from single parent households or abusive and turbulent home lives. And many of the girls mothers had also been teen mothers. Those are some similar patterns that I found coming from their background, but I also noticed that once each teen had the baby most of them experienced the same problems. All of the girls that were documented in Gloucester 18 and in the 16 and Pregnant episode that I watched eventually became single mothers, and many of them had an additional child with the same previous father or with a new one. It seemed to me that with all of these girls, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. All of them experienced financial trouble, major discrepancies with their child's father or with family members, and struggled to obtain an education.
   The one difference that I did find between Gloucester 18 and 16 and Pregnant was that the girls documented in Gloucester 18 looked at teen pregnancy as something that happens all the time. The girls didn't seem to be really phased by what had happened to them, they kind of had an "oh well" attitude about their situation. In the 16 and Pregnant episode that I watched, the girl that became pregnant was ostracized by her classmates and several of her family members, she was very affected by her situation. Teen pregnancy is a nation wide issue, but I think some areas of the country are affected more than others. I was shocked by the girl in the Gloucester 18 film that confessed to getting pregnant at just twelve years old, if girls are getting pregnant before they even reach their teens that to me is a crime that demands an immediate plan of action. I have a twelve year old sister and I cannot imagine her getting pregnant at her age. My sister is still a child that plays with barbies and watches Spongebob cartoons on saturday mornings, she is not capable of becoming a mother at her present age.
   Teenage pregnancy has always bothered me because these young mothers are really only children themselves. In the Gloucester 18 film the young girl who sat in the park with her baby and her mother could not even speak for her self, her mother talked to her as you would talk to a shy child to get her to open up about her son. In every documented situation in both the film and the episode, the one thing I saw was irresponsibility. These kids struggle to survive and create a life for their child but it seems that they are always doomed from the start. You can't raise a child when you still require to be raised yourself. After watching the media content for this week I am convinced that abstinence only education is a crime against humanity. Sexual Education should be available to everyone for their safety and protection. If these young girls had been properly educated on the practices of safe sex I am certain that less of them would have become pregnant.