Posted by Bitch Lab at 2:48 am and filed under Reproductive Rights ::
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The color of money Spider critter
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
04-05-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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I like what you’re saying here and I wanted to put a bit finer point on one thing:
if you’re poor and you don’t have opportunities for a college education and a meaningful job, then exactly what else do you do with your life? You may be fine with working in a factory or punching cash register keys, but how do you define yourself as an adult in that important transition to adulthood? It’s also that, in some cultures, motherhood is a valued identity.
As a good portion of middle class kids agonize over where they’re going to college, “what they’re going to do with their lives” - in other words, trying to make their lives meaningful- it makes sense that many kids without the economic privilege which yields such choice in how to make one’s life meaningful, would find their meaning in family.
I read a study years ago, when I worked as an OB nurse serving inner city Chicago women (mostly ghetto, teens, exactly these young moms) which said these young women are having their babies at the best time of their lives, physiologically speaking — considering their impoverished environments, exposure to environmental pollution, poor diets, life stresses, they are at their healthiest while young to reproduce. These same girls develop serious complex medical problems early in life — 30s, 40s — which impair ability to carry a healthy pregnancy. They — not well off white people — become the “train wrecks” which populate public hospitals later in life with multiple medical conditions.
Very different life circumstances from middle to uppermiddleclass white women who haven’t a clue about how the other half live.
And guess who become the doctors and most of the midwives who take care of these women in the health care system? You betcha. Clueless caregivers.
My classmates (I won’t go into this one again) who are in their 20’s, very privileged, took too many women’s studies classes at their elite schools, make really stupid comments in class how they are astonished that any woman in her 20’s could possibly have a child.
And you know what? Everyone (white, educated) presumes these same young ghetto moms are all drug users, smokers, &c. Well, I observed that not many of them at all were drug users or smokers. I think the drug use, drinking, and smoking rate is higher, much higher, among middle to upper class white kids. These poor girls know everyone in the health care system presume they are druggies. I also observed there’s a great number of teen moms who have one child, which is what they want, then finish school, and go to either a job or college.
@ EL
*nod* *nod*
That’s the biggest issue — on the ground in my practical experience. I mean, this was an very alarming thing for this county in NY, which had been plagued by these high rates for years.
But the experience is also buttressed by a lot of research, the most memorable work is that of Eli Anderson in _Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in and Urban Community_ (from memory that’s the title). He also wrote _Code of the Streets_ and quite a bit of his stuff is online.
He shows how racism and lack of economic opportunit limit their lives and turn young people toward established gender roles as ways of establishing an adult identity. Everything around them tells young men that they have to have the bling to be a man and they have to have the bling to get the women. But they don’t have the bling, so what Anderson calls “the game” becomes really important to them. It’s not because they’re pathological, trying to get women pregnant by lying about romance and white picket fences and two cats in the yard. They really _want_ that, because that’s how you are a man in this culture: you provide for your family.
So, when they engage in this kind of talk with women, they want to believe it, but they also feel they won’t ever get it, and getting the sex and racking up notches on their belts is kind of a substitute for what they’d really like.
Girls, in turn, feel the same way. They want the ‘American Dream’ that’s dished up in the media, too. When faced with racism and a lack of economic opportunity, they turn to the other ways of becoing women — having children. It also gives them a sense of purpose and meaning in their life. For, even if gender relations are sucking for them in terms of finding a stable relationship, at least they have this.
I have a stepson who married very young because his gf felt exactly this way. She wasn’t prepared to have an abortion, but her whole life had been spent babysitting and going through the motions in school. What was the next stage? At 19, she’d already been working full-time. This was a small town. It’s not like working the register at a pizza joint and babysitting was going to provide vast opps for career advancement.
Baby time.
They made me a grandma at the ripe old age of 29. heh.
I grew up in the rural south and high school pregnancy was a regular occurrence, at least partly because of lack of access to birth control (you try going to by condoms from the pharmacist who knows your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and sees them at church every week), but also partly because teenage parenthood is the norm in many rural areas. Why be surprised if Carrie Lynn gets pregnant at 16 when her mama was 18 and her grandma was 15 and her sister was 19 and one aunt was 17 and the other was 19…and on and on. Teenage parenthood and marriage is normalized in such places.
In keeping with the ethnic aspect of the discussion, the area I grew up in was 99.9% white. I can’t give an economic breakdown; in areas like that even well off people live in trailers — the old joke about you know your neighbor is rich when he gets a double-wide — but from observation it does not seem that economic class played much of a role. Teen parents and spouses came from all income levels.
What may be surprising was the phenomenon of high school students getting married out of a desire for marriage; no pregnancy involved. This seemed exclusive to the middle class and above income levels. And I have no hypothesis to explain this.
Teen pregnancy was at its highest in the 1950s with the parents of the baby boomers … with the post war push to get women out of the factories and back into the home so that returning GIs could take their rightful place as heads of households and bread winners. Many women married in their teens and starting dropping kids right away.