Wanderlust

Crossing the plains

June 8, 2007 at 4:06 pm gvblog Leave a comment

Today we’re driving out to Viroqua, Wisconsin, and from there I’m striking out across the plains to South Dakota and points westerly.  I’m feeling woefully unprepared at this particular moment, mostly because I have no idea which way I’m going or where I’m staying. I know that mostly just means it will be an adventure, but at the outset it’s a little bit consternating.

I promised a few days ago to write about Sistas on the Rise, so I’m doing it!  Here we go.

At the Sistersong conference, I attended a workshop on the realities of being a teen parent put together by Sistas on the Rise (SOTR), an organization  dedicated to creating space for women of color, particularly young mothers, to lead, participate in, and shape social justice movements  and advocacy efforts around issues that are relevant to them.  In addition to being the most effectively and skillfully facilitated workshop I attended at the conference, it was also the most thought-provoking.

 

The women from SOTR led us in a discussion about how we, and society, view teen parents.  Participants raised the reality that teen parents are often scapegoated for all the ills of society, from abuses of the welfare system to crime and juvenile delinquency. There all kinds of assumptions that people make when they see teen parents- that they are irresponsible, don’t think about the consequences of their actions, that they’re having children in order to get more money out of the government. Some of  these things may well be true for some of the women who have children as teenagers – but they are certainly not true for all teen mothers, or even the vast majority of them.  But even if they are, how are these assumptions useful?

I’ve had an evolution in how I think about teen pregnancy. It was easy for me to pity teen moms – many of them are raised in environments where teen pregnancy is expected and sometimes encouraged, and they often don’t have role models who are making other choices.  My thoughts ran along the lines of "Those poor women – surely they wouldn’t have children so young if only they had more options." This analysis was coming from a place of empathy, but was totally misguided. By automatically assuming that getting pregnant as a teen is a bad decision, we fail to account for women’s ability to consider the options available to her. Sometimes getting pregnant is a good decision for young women in the context of the choices she has available.  I think that by failing to acknowledge the reality of that choice – that bearing a child is a decision that the woman is making – we lose an opportunity to talk about how and why she makes that choice.

There is so much focus on teen pregnancy as a negative – you always hear about teen pregnancy as an epidemic, a problem to be addressed – that we fail to see how it can be – and is – a positive choice for many young women. I think that organizations like Sistas on the Rise are taking a new and incredibly refreshing position on the issue by simultaneously honoring the ability of teens to bear children and working to create opportunities for young women beyond childbearing and rearing.  I realize that you can do both, and to focus only on teen pregnancy as a scourge that needs to be eradicated is patronizing to the young women who are getting pregnant and creates a dynamic in which it’s nearly impossible to create space for real conversation about it.

 

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