Breaking News: Teens Can Get Pregnant After Having Sex

16-year old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant.* That news is so last week. I know. Her mom and sister were furious, but now they are coming to terms with it. That’s not news; that’s understandable. There have been suggestions about her becoming a spokesperson for safe sex. What do you think about that?

There is no question that a higher percentage of teenagers are having sex now than in the past several decades. An HHS (U.S. Health and Human Services) report on Sexual Activity and Fertility also states:

Because sexual intercourse during the teen years, especially first intercourse, is often unplanned, it is not surprising that it is often unprotected by contraception.

So, does it make sense that in the absence of contraception (and abstinence) that teenage girls at least have an understanding of how their body works and when there is a very high risk of conceiving? Unprotected sex is never not risky, and I am certainly not condoning that. What I am condoning, however, is at least a discussion around
enhancing females’ knowledge about their own bodies.

Kristen from Lively Woman reviewed Toni Weschler’s Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen’s Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body a few months ago. The book received some criticism because some felt that it gave teens too many tools to calculate their fertile times. I loved Sognatrice’s comment on it:

If we look far enough into who’s really against spreading such knowledge, we’ll find not only (often) religious “you’re encouraging sex” arguments but also drug companies–I’m guessing birth control manufacturers are just a tad nervous about what might happen if menstruating women learn to control our reproduction by knowing our bodies better.

Hear! Hear!

And why is teen pregnancy all that shocking anyway? Dr. Lawrence Shaw gave a fascinating lecture at this year’s European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in which he reminded us that,

Our natural time to have children, and the peak of our fertility, is late teens and early twenties, yet Western society regards teenage pregnancy as a ‘problem’ and cannot cope well with them.

So, back to Jamie. Since the paparazzi will undoubtedly be trailing her and the growth of her belly for the next several months, she has an opportunity and an outlet to discuss a number of issues: safe sex, teen pregnancy, the price of stardom at such an early age…whatever she wants, really. The trick will be to do it in a manner that won’t ever seem to her child that he/she was unwanted or seen as a cautionary tale. (those Google archives are a b*tch.)

*And you thought I only talked about not getting pregnant.