The scariest part about mothering several small children simultaneously is the overwhelming sensation of not being able to do enough, to ensure each and every child gets the love, time and attention it needs and deserves. I know this because I turned twenty-one in August 1984, and gave birth to Read more…
After pondering the Bristol Palin pregnancy revelation for several days, I realize the need to wrap two serious issues with the potential to be deadly into one post: teen pregnancy and dating violence. They’re not only connected, they’re so closely interwoven that you can’t talk about one without the other.
I say this because of the recent study I wrote about in July. Commissioned by Liz Claiborne, Inc., it found that pre-teens (“tweens”) as young as 11-years-old are dating AND becoming victims of violence in the process.
Such violence can and does lead to pregnancy, as a 1995 Alan Guttmacher Institute study found. It revealed men age 20 or older fathered 66-percent of the babies born to teen mothers. Which makes it, by definition, child abuse. This problem hasn’t gone away; it’s just been swept under the rug until just such a time as this: The daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is about to become an unwed mother (until she marries her teenage boyfriend, Levi Johnston).
Because a national audience is focused on a young woman who, by all rights, should be given the dignity of bearing her child in private, and also because the national teen pregnancy rate spiked in 2006 for the first time in 14 years, there is no better time to talk about the repercussions of teen dating and pregnancy than now.
The other consequence from teen dating can be seen by what happened to Sami Hightshoe and Lindsay Burke: Sami was repeatedly sexually abused in the woods behind her school and in her own home by her boyfriend, from the age of 14 until she finally found a way to end the relationship—with a restraining order against the guy. To protect Sami, her family had to spend $6,000 in legal fees.
Journalists were in the hot seat about two months ago, when national headlines made a coal mining tragedy here in West Virginia much worse. Everyone knows that. But what many people may not know is that some of those journalists came to Morgantown six weeks after the Sago Mine disaster, Read more…
NOTE: A portion of this was broadcast on WVPB on January 10, the day family and friends buried Sago miner and Newburg resident Terry Helms. When I went to bed just before 2 a.m. on January 4, I thought that 12 coal miners trapped beneath the earth in a town Read more…