Friday, August 27, 2010

Teen Moms

I am, or was 15 when I found out the first time I was pregnant. Now your ‘ass-u-me-ing’ a lot at this moment but maybe stop and ask your self a few questions such as,

What would make a teen age girl have sex?

Many answers to that question and many will never share their rational truth as they remember it at that age…me…I wanted to be loved.

I ‘viewed’ sex as an act of ‘love’ between two people, one that would bind them together for a life time.

How wrong I was. Sex…an act between two people that may or may not be consensual, consummated for what ever reason those involved have.

Love…the way I feel about that baby I conceived at 15. Love a condition of the heart that requires one to sacrifice self many times over, for the achievement of happiness in the one you love.


I walked home that last day on the bluff, knowing the baby I now carried would be raised with out a father, grateful for the ‘little bit’ I had to remind me of the love we had shared so briefly. I was rationalizing in my head the work I had ahead of me and the possibility of defeat. Scared, knowing I was alone, as no one else would ever understand why, at 15, this baby meant life or death for me.

As I walked the few miles home I ran through a gauntlet of emotions, fear being the number one. Fear of what my parents would say, Fear that others would judge them harshly for my choice, and it was a choice for me. Fear that I would not succeed as I felt I could, and most of all fear that the baby I carried would hate me for even trying to be a mom at 15.

Now to clear one thing up, I had no intention on purposely getting pregnant, but somehow I knew after the encounter that I was, just as I knew this would be the last encounter with my child’s father a man I had loved since early childhood.

My pregnancy was not kept secret from all, a few friends rationalized me into an abortion but arriving at the clinic we found a back door into a ‘basement clinic’….I was too scared to walk in the door.

At twenty weeks adults in town had noticed my expanding girth and made it clear it was time to tell my folks or they would, knowing they could NOT make me go to that clinic I finally found the mental strength to tell my parents who raised me with morals and values that I had misplaced them, and my birth control pills…and now they were going to be grandparents.
I survived that storm and many others since then. The baby I had is now a man and has given me grandbabies…how do I feel today about the life I lived and the decisions I made then?

My first answer to this would have been its no ones business, until that is this ballot measure passed on the Alaskan Abortion Laws….Now I want to speak out on behalf of ALL young people who find them selves with child, for what ever reason…and I promise there are many…I have spent a life time supporting helping and talking to these young ladies trying to give back just a little of what a few very caring adults gave me at times when my youth needed the guidance.

***these girls names have been changed or omitted for personal reasons and their names mean nothing to this writing, their situations DO…

*** fifteen year old, drinking with friends finds herself with child, rationalizing the ‘adult’ games that come along with having a baby she chooses to have this child and call herself mom. She did well in the beginning until sleepless nights; lack of money and lack of personal self pushed her back into ‘looking for life in greener pastures’. This young lady drug her child around from man to man, home to home, and party to party. Today the baby from this story is residing behind bars. He struggled in society as long as he could and eventually got caught involved in an armed robbery. His mother still returns to the local bars and is probably single once again.

***This same scenario with grandparents that chose to ‘adopt’ the child…the child also had children at an early age and could have followed in her mamas foot steps, but others interfered and helped her make a better life for her and her kids.

***A thirteen year old girl, having baby number three, although she called one and two ‘sisters’, questions arose in my head on this one and eventually I learned that this young lady was a baby factory for her step father and mother. Told if ‘daddy’ makes the baby in you then it’s a sibling not your child. Told it was her duty to do this for her family as her mother could not have any more babies. At thirteen she barely questioned this theory, but at fifteen when she was pregnant with baby number four she sure did, today all her kids are being raised in other ‘family’ homes, last I knew she was a mother/sister to five at the age of 17 where she is now I have no clue, and her parents both reside in rooms with bars.

***The child born to parents who “did not even know they were pregnant”, these parents walked off and left their newborn in the grocery store! Returned three hours later and could not figure out why the police had been called, they left her with a diaper bag, bottles diapers and such….mom thought dad had her, dad thought mom had her, neither parent went straight home. Where is this child today? My guess is wandering around the streets still looking for her parents.

There are many reasons a young lady would chose NOT to talk to her parents about being pregnant, I felt mine would force me to abort my baby, others feel theirs would not let them, still others would get abused, while others have no choice in the matter…and in just one day the state of Alaska assumed ALL young girls who conceive a child are in one of two categories,

Parents who care, or parents who don’t…when in reality the picture is so much larger. Add the emotions from parents who find out their child is pregnant. Anger could make them chose an option for their child that is not in the best interest of their child or the child being fought over.

Now let me introduce you to a few moms, moms who made choices for the life with in their belly….

***at fifteen she was in for abortion number four…today she struggles to conceive a child…now this young woman knowing she has had her share went out and began “foster parenting” and went on to adopt a small family of her own…educated with a good job she now has the ability to support and care for the babies she was so reckless with in her youth, not her biological babies, but babies who;s mamas would have aborted had she not stood up and said “May I have them”…a solution to the abortion problem…

***She too was pregnant at a young age and had conceived this child while at a party. She reported doing many different drugs and consuming large quantities of alcohol from before conception to well past the fifth week. Abortion clinics being hard to come by in her area she went on with her life in hopes that the life style would “take care of the problem”. Instead…she gave birth to a addicted baby boy…who struggled for survival through many many painful procedures and hours or withdrawals as his little body struggled to free itself of the toxins his mama had ingested just hours before his birth. Now this young mother had not even informed her parents she was pregnant, her father being an attorney and her mom a physician she chose to deliver her baby in a bathroom at a motel.
Today…that baby died at age ten from drug related issues after many years of medical battles and procedures that cost the state a lot of money, as the child’s mother left that day in the motel, left her baby for dead……

***This mom was denied an abortion, not wanting her child she ‘sold’ her into ‘sex slavery’…the child was seized from home at 9 months old and was being “pimped out’ for what a baby does best…”suck”…yes that is disgusting but it happens more often than our sheltered worlds will allow us to see…this child was a “sucking slave” until the age of two when the state seized her for the fifth time and put her into the foster care system. This young lady at the age of ten was committed for life into a mental institution deemed “un-rehabilitative” and was charged with “sexual misconduct” to other foster kids….had Wellfare paid for an abortion five other kids would not have been traumatized and this child would not have been raised as a sex slave and now will spend her life being supported behind bars by tax payers.

I have pointed out here just a few scenarios I was exposed to through out the years I have chosen to make myself available to others for love and support. My dreams will be forever haunted with small faces, mom faces, and the what ifs…..

Over the years the only solution I can come up with in my head is, we live in America land of the free, to each his own, a young lady who chooses an abortion has to live with that, the rest of us would not even know it happened if we were not so nosey….parental rights? What about the teen- agers potential parental rights?...

I would rather see a young lady abort her baby with or without her parents permission then have it when they would rather live their lives for them selves and that child takes the punishment from the parent behavior in ways that will be imbedded in its life style and memory bank…