Pregnancy Pact Fallout

Now it's being contested that there was no actual pregnancy pact in the Massachusetts high school. See this article from the Boston Herald http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view/2008_06_25_Preg_pact_story_unravels/srvc=home&position=0



I find this disturbing on a great many levels. First, the journalist of the original piece is still insisting that she is correct. While I can understand her motivation, I want to ask a question "Are you just trying to maintain your 'journalistic integrity' by refusing to admit you may have misinterpreted an off-hand remark?" One of the benefits and curses of having a very free press is that often remarks that were made for specific individuals in an attempt to be humorous get completely taken out of context and turned into "news" stories. It's like the revenge of the National Enquirer set. Based on the above link and other related stories, it could appear that one of the social workers may have been trying to be funny when she said that the girls all made a pact to get pregnant by the end of the school year.



Second, the backlash, deserved or not, is going to dominate the news and take away from actual news stories that people need to know about. For example, when was the last time that current information about the war on Terror in Afghanistan made the news? Have we caught that Bin Ladin character yet? No? Don't care? Well, that's sad, because that is actual news from a war that affects everyone, not just those of us in the US.

There's a reason that the American news is ridiculed, it's that we have no content in our news. It's just one sensationalistic story after another - such as the continuing coverage of the b-list (or lower) celebrities like Britney or Paris - while some people care about what happens to people who are famous for their meltdowns or what their grandparents did to make money, it is NOT news when they break a fingernail! Interrupting a news broadcast about Afghanistan to show Ms. Hilton going to jail is absurd.

Finally, when there is a retraction due to shoddy journalism, it's buried on the back pages of a newspaper or footnoted at the end of the broadcast. And those two conditions only occur when the "news journalists" ADMIT they may have erred. All too often, the mistakes are just ignored in the hope that they will go away.

It's unfortunate that so many "news" sites, magazines and TV shows seem to run this kind of sensationalized story in an effort to improve hits, ratings or sales. Sensationalizing the news can only reduce the quality of the news source to one step, if that, above the supermarket tabloid.

Regardless of the outcome, it's still painfully obvious that whatever we are teaching our teens about sex and babies, it's horribly flawed. I feel that the basic understanding here must be that teens are going to have sex, REGARDLESS of what we teach them about it. No amount of abstinance pacts, abstinance only sex ed, contraceptive use sex ed in the classroom is going to change that. Scaring them does not seem to work either, just look at the rates of STDs in this county. So what is the solution? Perhaps parents should make the effort to talk to their kids about uncomfortable subjects. Surely talking to them can't do a worse job with sex ed than politically dictated sex ed does. The advantage to having the parents do the talking means that the schools/teachers will no longer have to listen to as much complaining about the lousy job they did preparing a daughter to get pregnant by her hook-up boyfriend.