We Come For Your Daughter, Chuck

One Ohio high school has an unfathomable 64 pregnant students. That's 13% of the entire female population of the school. Knocked up. Not just sexually active, mind you, but preggers.

Experts, parents and students themselves struggle to explain why such pockets of high teen pregnancy rates appear. Are teens getting appropriate sex education? Do they have access to birth control and are they using it consistently? Has the stigma of unwed motherhood lost its edge?

"This might be a school that is forthright with its problems while others are not," said Jay Green, chairman of the Education Reform department at the University of Arkansas. "But this is a widespread issue."

Green wrote a study last year for the conservative New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that found 20 percent of urban teenagers have been pregnant, compared with 14 percent of suburban teens.

I knew I was a loser in high school, but I had no idea I was such a loser.

20% of urban teenagers have been pregnant at one time or another, and 14% of suburban teenagers. When I was a teenager, I thought touching a boob was a major sexual victory. During my most intensely popular phase in high school, I had roughly as much actual sex as a character in a PG-13 comedy. And not even a cool 1980's PG-13 comedy. One made last year.

The locals are, in part, blaming the school system, which promotes the President's favorite form of sex education - complete blind ignorance. No! I mean, "abstinence-only education," which is actually an oxymoron. Abstinence, of course, means to refrain from something (in this case, sex), which is the opposite of learning about something.

Not that I'm saying sex education classes should actually involve students having sex (although everyone would be paying way more attention). But you should definitely tell kids the reality about sex, rather than mystifying it by keeping everything a secret. I went to high school in an area that's politically conservative (Orange County, CA), but fairly lax socially, and even we had kind of weird, hard-line sex education.

In my 8th Grade Health class (taught by a nerdy PE coach named Mr. Pierce, who may very well still teach at Sierra Vista Middle School) , we learned several things I now recognize, in retrospect, were half-truths or outright lies. Most egregiously, I recall specifically Mr. Pierce telling us that condoms often break or come off, so they are not a sound way to prevent pregnancy or STD transmission.

(Guess what the only good way to do so was? Never having sex at all! And remembering that they call it "dope" because only "dopes" use it. You're not a dope, are you?)

Mr. Pierce even did this bogus little experiment where he held up a rubber glove (I swear) and poked a little tiny hole in it with a safety pin, and then passed it around to show us how hard it was to spot the hole. Then he said that this very same thing happens with condoms all the time, only the holes can be much smaller and still allow sperm through.

What bullshit. I mean, sure, technically, a condom can break or fall off or have a tiny hole in it. The statistic you often hear is that condoms have 98% efficacy.

But unless someone sits around the Safe-Way and pokes holes in all the condom wrappers with a safety pin, you're probably gonna be alright. And it's way better to wear a jimmy than just not wear one.

And that's Orange County. I can only imagine what loads of crap kids in other parts of the country are being fed.

Joanne Hinton, whose 16-year-old daughter, Raechel Hinton, is eight months pregnant, said she believes the school's abstinence-based sex education program isn't enough.

"It's time to take the blinders off and realize that these kids are having sex," she said. "Obviously, abstinence is not working. If we have to, just give them condoms."

Abstinence-based programs have been growing nationwide at schools over the past few years. In Ohio, the Bush's administration and the state's health department have awarded $32 million in grants to Ohio agencies for abstinence education since 2001.

She may be right, I suppose, although I can't help but wonder why she needs a school to buy her child some condoms. If she recognizes that her child is sexually active and her child may not have access to condoms, she could always buy them for her. Or, if she's too embarrassed (although this is your kids future we're talking about), buy them and leave them around in obvious places. A drawer in the bathroom, the medicine cabinet, a cardboard box with the words "FREE RUBBERS FOR SLUTTY DAUGHTERS" scribbled on it in Sharpie.

I mean, I'm all for schools distributing condoms. I'm for schools distributing coat hangers if it will mean less unwanted, illegitimate infants running around. (Oh, man, that's so wrong...I'm sorry I wrote that, folks, and even more sorry that I'm not going to delete it).

I just don't see how this situation could have possibly gotten this bad. Maybe it's just this one high school got totally out of control. Like, if three popular girls got pregnant all at the same time, and a lot of underclassman were inspired to copy them in an attempt to sort of follow in their pouplarity footsteps. After a while, it would be "no big thing."

"Oh, you're gonna have twins? Yeah, whatever, way to copy me. I've already had, like, two sets of twins, and an albino with 11 toes and a cleft palatte, so just save it, bitch."