Category Archives: Marriage

Teen Pregnancy: What’s the Problem?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 3, 2005

“Did you know? The only 100% foolproof way to prevent pregnancy is not to have sex?”

This is front page news heralded by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy on its website home page.  Recognizing the significance of America’s problem with teen pregnancies, they have set a goal to “reduce the rate of teen pregnancy by one-third between 1996 and 2005.”  This is the final year…a time to measure success…or failure.

The National Campaign website goes to great lengths to explain the urgency of this goal.  “A basic tenet of the Campaign is that reducing the nation’s rate of teen pregnancy is one of the most strategic and direct means available to improve overall child well-being and, in particular, to reduce persistent child poverty.”

Connecting cause to effect, their website points an official finger at the cause of teen pregnancies…having sex.  Ah…well…yeah…mmm…but…well, then what?

So…you don’t have sex?  And you don’t get pregnant?  This is news?

Ah…well…yeah…mmm…but…sex…well…then…what?  You don’t have sex?  Forever?  A lump forms in our throat.  Forever?  No sex?

The problem with the problem of teen pregnancy in America is our reluctance to deal with the solution.  We get as far as telling teens to not have sex…telling them this will prevent teen pregnancy.  But we have yet to settle as a nation on the time when they get to have sex.

If teens are going to be willing to abstain from having sex, we owe them a standard for the defining time when having sex is OK.  When can they start having sex?

There is a long list of answers that have been trotted out over the years…you can have sex…

…when you’re in love

…when you’re responsible

…when you’re mature

…or my favorite…

…when you’re ready…to have sex.

For thirty years, giving teens approval to have sex at the moment when they felt responsible and mature and ready, we pushed teen pregnancy rates to an all-time high in 1990 of 117 pregnancies per 1000 girls ages 15-19.

Then a change began.  In the early 1990s, maverick trend-setting teachers, bucking the “truisms” of sexual “enlightenment,” began to teach students the truth.  Sex causes pregnancy.  And if you take this truth seriously, the only time to begin having sex is when you are ready to bear the responsibilities of being pregnant…giving birth…and raising a child…when you are married.

Doctors and legislators began to connect the dots between the cause and the problem of teen pregnancy.  In 1996, Congress allocated its first small sums of money to encourage innovative educators to find effective ways to teach this truth to students and to help them achieve success in remaining sexually abstinent until marriage.

In 2000, the last year reported on the National Campaign’s records for teen pregnancies, we can be heartened by signs of success.  From the high of 117 pregnancies per thousand in 1990, we achieved a low of 84 pregnancies per thousand in 2000.

Teens are getting the message.  They are responding.  But is this enough?

It is 2005, and we are reaching for the prize.  If we are to reach the National Campaign’s goal of a reduction by one-third in teen pregnancies from 1996 to 2005, we are looking at fewer than 65 pregnancies per 1000 teen girls.

If we truly desire to reach this goal, we must reflect once more with urgency on the messages we give teens about when to not have sex…and when to have sex.

When do we want them to have babies?  When do we want our children raising our grandchildren?  How many of us will feel blessed if our children are lucky enough to be unified with a spouse…together as mother and father, husband and wife…two parents who love each other and are committed to building an enduring relationship for the benefit of their children?

If we want to solve the problem of teen pregnancy, we will have to do more than tell teens when not to have sex.  We will have to set the standards for having sex…abstinence…until marriage…a good choice for this generation…and the generation of babies they will bring into the world.

August 13, 2004:    Only

October 22, 2004:   Bringing Poppa Home

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The Best Part of Snuggling

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 10, 2004

It is black outside.  Soft pits and pats against the window…rain…and I pull the blanket closer, sinking back into the arm of the recliner.  A hot cup of tea rests at my elbow.  It is my favorite time of the day.

In the darkness, I think back to other special mornings, twenty years ago.  Wrapped in my green plush robe, rocking back and forth, it was many a quiet dark morning when I would slowly sense the presence of another person.  My son, a toddler of three, had padded into the living room, up next to my chair, with his small eyes fixed on me.

Wordlessly, in agreement that the peace of the morning was large enough for both of us, I would open my robe.  Knowing what to do, he climbed onto my lap, and I pulled the robe around us, a snuggling of two.  In many a dark early morning, so many years ago, we kept the peace together.

Snuggling…it’s hard to know the best part.  Is it the dark, the quiet, the soft touch of a hand on the shoulder?  Is it protection, comfort, acknowledgement, relationship?  Safety?  Is it the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me because I share your heartbeat?

I was jarred to attention last week.  I was asked to consider the first time I ever snuggled, my earliest snuggle of life, and the question brought me up short.

Was it inside the warm white blanket wrapped around me as I was laid into the arms of my mother in the hospital?  Or was it later…close against her as she nursed me, her firstborn?  Maybe my father was the first to snuggle me, peering intently, measuring the smallest eyes and lips of a baby…his…held in the crook of his arm.

Maybe…but the magic of science has opened the window on snuggling, and I think it must surely have been weeks, even months before my birth, when I knew I was safe, a knowing of safety available to all living beings even before they can explain it in words.

Surely, weeks before birth, wrapped into a bundle of baby, between my bursts of pushing and kicking against the walls of the womb…surely there were quiet moments shared with my mother where we snuggled and dreamt.  Already at this stage I had fine hair, teeth, and eyelash fringes around eyelids that opened and closed…and opened again…for infant eyes that looked around.  When she spoke, I knew my mother’s voice…outside…serenading me as I waited my time.

Certainly, even weeks earlier, when the womb was large enough for me to swim and stretch and turn somersaults, I took time to rest and sleep and snuggle.  Inside my mother’s quiet belly, worn out from my infant gymnastics, curling my toes, I would have stuck my thumb into my mouth and felt the safety of darkness…protected and safe.

One thing is certain.  I know I snuggled long before I made my first appearance under bright hospital lights.  No matter what some want to claim I was back then…a blob, a mass of cells, an embryo, a fetus…a product of conception…I was, without a doubt, a flourishing child of my parents, thriving and growing.

Today, cloaked in a battle of terminology, creating labels devoid of humanity, there are those who wish us to forget that we once snuggled in the womb.  They will not have their way with me.

I claim my existence, refusing to be dehumanized at any stage of development.  Supported by the miraculous development of four-dimensional ultrasound, doctors and parents can follow the development of babies like me.  At eight weeks, I was fully formed, a human of one inch in length, every organ present, with a strong beating heart.

At nine weeks, my fingerprints were already engraved, and my fingers were ready to grasp an object placed in my palm.

At ten weeks, my body was sensitive to touch. I squinted and swallowed. I puckered my brow and frowned.

And then I smiled…at eleven weeks.  And if I could smile, it is certain that I smiled because I felt safe, snuggled inside, nurtured and protected…my life ahead to be enjoyed and cherished.

So many years later, watching the dawn break on the mountains outside the window, I follow the beads of rain that trickle down the glass.  Another beautiful day outside, crisp and damp.  The garden will sparkle when the sun breaks through the clouds.  I take a sip of tea and pull the blanket up under my chin.

My son is grown now, and I must snuggle alone.  It’s enough, but it’s not the best there is.

If there really is a best thing to snuggling, this would have to be it…revived by thoughts of long ago…a bundle wrapped together, two of us sharing the morning…the best thing of all surely being the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me…because I share your heartbeat.

 *************************************

DEDICATION 

This column is dedicated to the many committed educators who are not afraid to teach our children about their earliest days of life inside the womb.  May these faithful teachers be encouraged in their work.

 

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 June 25, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

Old as the Hills

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 12, 2004

It was an old house…ancient even…abused and crumbling.  Windows twisted out on bent hinges, leaving ample space to climb through and into the back bedroom where the black paint of recent renters covered the peeling red and green layers of past owners.  Wood floors creaked, plaster walls cracked open, and loose rusty pipes rumbled below as my husband and I walked through, exploring our first home.

Thirty years later, this sorry-excuse-for-a-house has risen from the ashes, a bright little castle in the small historic area of Phoenix.  It is a gem.  A treasure.  Restored and repaired, it will bring more money per square foot than any modern state-of-the-art darling “home for sale.”

My husband and I often sit on our front porch in the evenings and look down the street.  We live in a neighborhood of resurrected Lazaruses, as my parents call them, homes that have seen the tides of time carry them through periods of respect, rejection…and respect again.

Ours is the perfect neighborhood for an antique car rally.  Indeed, once a year we carry our lawn chairs down the street and sit along Central Avenue.  It’s a neighborhood block party under shimmering street lamps, a friendly celebration of old cars turned new, remodeled …and recharged.

New…grown old…and restored to new again.  It is a process respected for cars and homes.  Surprisingly, restoration is a process that works on us as people, even as we labor to scrub and polish steel and wood.

Restoration.  As we refinish and polish, we reconnect with things eternal…family, simplicity, honor, integrity.  We learn that honor is not conferred from the outside by a modern designer feted as the “latest and greatest.”  Honor is a glow from the inside, private and quiet and still…a light eternal, burning even when we turn our backs and seek the glitter and glamour of fashion and celebrity.

Restoration.  It is a concept that works for ideas just as well as it works for houses and cars.  Virginity…chastity, abstinence, purity…all old words turned new again, like a fresh coat of paint on an antique car.  New words…but it’s still the same old thing.  Love.

No matter how much we want to equate sex with love and confuse the issues, the clarity of truth is a pure light that never waivers.  Love…imbued with patience, fueled with trust…love waits its turn.  Love in its purest form is passion held in check for the benefit of the one true object of my affection.  And sex can wait.

Abstinence is not just an old idea gone bad…outdated and ready for the rubbish pile.  Abstinence works.  It restores health.  It restores hearts.  It restores souls.

In the British Medical Journal an article on abstinence strips away the false glitter of the sexual revolution.  The article says a reduction in the number of sexual partners is the tried and true key to halting spread of HIV.  Here it is, a modern gussied-up term… partner reduction…by any other name…the new and modern is the same old same old…abstinence…the old made new again.

By any other name, abstinence is the sexual revolution of the future…abstinence until marriage…a chastity and purity as old as the hills.  It is the perfection of “partner reduction;” it is the one and only…the person who cares enough to give a heart and a promise eventually perfected with the sexual passion of love committed for a lifetime.

An old sign hangs above the door in our old home restored to new.  My mother bought it at a garage sale, a gilded frame around a German phrase I have since learned in English: Faithful to the End.  Painted in blue, it is the promise of fidelity.  Loyalty.  Eternal virtues of the ultimate friendship, the best of devotion, sanctified in marriage…until death do us part.

Abstinence…abstinence until marriage…ideas being reduced to insignificance by people who think these are worn-out words as old as the hills.

Abstinence…abstinence until marriage…ideas of the future being ushered in as medically necessary to curb life-threatening diseases that promise to take control of out-of-control lives ruled by lust.

Abstinence…the tried-and-true method of reducing one’s sexual partners.  Modern science gives new reasons to respect the values of old.  Abstinence until marriage is the modern tool for preventing STDs and pregnancy…a new coat of paint on eternal truths that continue to glow.

Abstinence until marriage…an idea as old as the hills made new again…love resurrected, life-giving, and eternal.  Faithful to the end…the eternal glow of creation…resurrected…restored…abstinence until marriage, a gift as old as the hills to be renewed forevermore.

July 23, 2004:    My Friend Betty

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Kicking the Tires

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 5, 2004

Kelly and Dane spent the day in furniture stores picking out the perfect leather couch for their new apartment.  They are in love.   They are moving in together.  And they are not married.

“It’s not that we’re against marriage, but we’re just not ready for it,” says Dane.  “It’s a big commitment.”

Kelly nods in agreement.  “We saw both of our parents get divorced.  We love each other, and we’re talking about getting married.  But we don’t want to go through the pain of a divorce.”

Even as Americans are voting to affirm the special estate of marriage between a man and a woman, our children are having a hard time saying “I do.” Instead, like Kelly and Dane, many are taking their “love” for a “test drive,” trying to find out if it is the “marriage kind of love.”  They are kicking the tires before they buy.

The theory is that if they live together, they will be able to test their relationship before they make the serious lifelong commitment of marriage.  If everything works out, if they get along, then they can always get married.  If not, then they can just divide the furniture, decide who keeps the apartment, and go their separate ways.  No harm done.

According to the National Marriage Project, about 60 percent of young adults in America say they plan to live together before marriage.  These high levels of cohabitation have given researchers a solid base of data to compare cohabitation with marriage.  The results of their studies should give Kelly and Dane reason to pause before signing the lease on their apartment.

Dr. Bill Maier sums up the findings.  “Research indicates that couples who cohabit before marriage have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than those who don’t. These couples also have higher rates of domestic violence and are more likely to be involved in sexual affairs. If a cohabiting couple gets pregnant, there is a high probability that the man will leave the relationship within two years, resulting in a single mom raising a fatherless child.”

There are many factors to explain this.  But the most important has to do with the big “C.”  Commitment.

Commitment is more than a feeling.  It is an intentional decision.  It is choosing to love…in good times and bad.  The commitment of marriage is a willingness to step into the future, to face unknown challenges, to give unconditional love, to set one’s personal goals into a joint plan alongside the needs and goals of another person.  If it sounds like a big deal, it is.

Cohabitation, on the other hand, is based almost entirely on feelings.  It is a hope and a dream…with a preplanned exit strategy.  It’s a little deal because the promise exchanged is a little promise.  “I will stay with you until we’re not in love…until it gets hard…until I don’t want to stay with you.”

When couples plan to marry, they must face the big “C”.  They must have a clear understanding of what they are willing and able to give each other….today… tomorrow…for as long as they both shall live.

Cohabitation short circuits the process, fulfilling sexual desires and intermingling finances, allowing the couple to avoid the kind of soul-searching and mutual honesty needed to lay the solid foundation for a marriage.

As quaint as it sounds, traditional old-fashioned dating and courtship was a safe time for couples.  It reserved sex for the future and allowed them to focus on learning about each other.  It was an intentional time of planning for marriage, where the couple sought out advice from friends and counselors.  And if marriage did not result, heartbreak was not compounded with the burden of breaking up a household.

While the initial plan for Kelly and Dane is to “try it out,” it will be a very short time before one of them will begin to long for the safety and security of a permanent commitment.  The big “C”…it always makes its appearance.  And when it does, Kelly and Dane will have a lot at stake.  The surprising experience most couples face in cohabitation is that the pain of “breaking up” can be every bit as intense as divorce.

Please, Dane and Kelly.  Think it over.  Kicking the tires…good strategy for cars.  Bad idea for people.

April 23, 2004:    m…m…m…Married?

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Bringing Poppa Home

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 22, 2004

Nanny remembers it as “1963, the year the fifties ended, and the fathers in our town were leaving…. It was our collective great fear, that our fathers would leave us, start new families with younger and prettier children; we had seen it happen before.” A brave young girl in Anne LaMott’s All New People, she gave voice to the fears of an entire generation of children…and for the children of two successive generations.

Nanny was a prophetess.  On January 1, 1970, the first no-fault divorce law, California’s Family Law Act, became effective and eliminated the requirement to use one of seven statutory reasons for filing for divorce.  In the following decade, all other states followed California’s lead, making divorce an easy-as-pie solution to “incompatibility.”

In the past thirty-five years, as divorce has become commonplace, another statistic has been on the rise.  Unwed teen pregnancies have given birth to children whose fathers are absent from the very beginning…no divorce needed.

In just three decades, between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers more than doubled, from 17 percent to 36 percent.  Poppa’s gone.

Mama is left to handle the children on her own…their lunch money, their bruises and hurt feelings, their temper tantrums, fights at school, homework, dating, proms and first loves.  When children reach for a hand up and when they celebrate with a high five, they aim for one hand…the hand of their Mama.  Papa?  He’s gone.

This is no exaggeration.  About 40 percent of children in father-absent homes have not seen their father at all during the past year; 26 percent of absent fathers live in a different state than their children; and 50 percent of children living absent their father have never set foot in their father’s home.

The impact of absent fathers has proven complicit in a wide range of social problems: crime; premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock births to teenagers; deteriorating educational achievement; depression, substance abuse and alienation among adolescents; and the growing number of women and children in poverty.

How do we bring Poppa home?  The answer is being melded from many sources.  An Arizona judge requires counseling before divorce.  Legislatures are considering changes in no-fault divorce laws.  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has developed a special initiative to support and strengthen the role of fathers in families.

In the private sector, groups like the National Fatherhood Initiative and The Fatherhood Project are reaching out to dads with help on parenting, encouraging them to take an active role in the lives of their children.  And faith-based groups are taking the lead in helping to strengthen marriages and in giving couples effective strategies for dealing with conflict before it leads to divorce.

But the biggest hope in bringing Poppa home…and creating a home where he will stay…comes from a surprising group:  abstinence educators.  Abstinence education is all about placing sex in context, helping students understand that the natural result of sex is to produce children…in families…with parents…with Mamas…and Papas.

Joneen Krauth, who developed Wait Training abstinence programs, has her students begin a marriage file.  She encourages them to collect information on how to create and maintain healthy and happy relationships, and in particular, how to “marry smart”.  What are the compatibility factors that predict survival of relationships?  What are the seven warning signs of a bad relationship?  Is he/she “just a date”…or are they “my soul-mate”?

Students learn that relationships require the same planning, goals, and commitment as college educations and career plans.  They gain hope by realizing that even in a culture of divorce, they can learn how to avoid the mistakes that lead to broken relationships.

Abstinence until marriage…students learn to see sex, not in isolation, but in the full context of human life and relationships.  And in this context, where marriage is valued, students are laying the foundation for families where Papa and Mama come together…and stay together…for each other…and for their children.

October 15, 2004:    Where’s Poppa?

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