Like most people in our area, my best friend (who I will call “Kim” here for privacy reasons) became unemployed earlier in the year. After months of trying to ignore a long-term illness while she fruitlessly searched for a new job, she finally broke down and accepted the free health care provided by the county clinic. She had no choice. Her health issues have gotten to the point that she probably wouldn’t be able to take a job now if it was offered anyway.
I‘m not fond of doctor‘s offices in any form, but she talked me into going with her for moral support. This turned out to be a good thing because not only was Kim nervous, she became even more so when she realized that we were the only obviously “elder” women there and that the place gave a new definition to the word “chaos.“ No joking, when we first walked in I thought we’d screwed up in finding the address and wandered into a pregnancy clinic instead, because everyone there looked to be in their 20s and had at least one child. But as I sat in the waiting room with her trying not to notice the filthy floors and the overwhelming odor of the place, what struck me most was the amount of stupidity and irresponsibility that was represented in that stuffy little space.
In front of us was a young man sitting with twin girls of perhaps two years of age, and he spent a full half hour whining to the lady next to him about how he had been unable to find a job since before those girls were born. No matter how much I think about it, I can’t understand WHY he had the balls to hoot like an owl and clap his hands when his girlfriend came out and announced that she was pregnant again then?
To our right was a lone pregnant girl who had a baby on her hip that was too young to walk. This girl complained over and over again about how hard the pregnancy was on her and, when asked, she told the aforementioned daddy-of-twins that she was only sixteen. She acted as if being pregnant was just something that happened to her for no reason whatsoever.
To our left was a girl who looked to be around twenty one or twenty two, with her five kids… yes five, and it wasn’t hard to tell by looking at them that they all did *not* come from the same daddy. She was popping her gum and talking loudly on her cell phone to somebody she was apparently going to “hook up with” later, oblivious as her kids did a good job of rivaling the noise levels normally found at a poorly run daycare center. The worst part was, she was sitting directly under a poster that advertised the assortment of free birth control options that were available right there at the clinic.
I could go on and on, giving numerous more such examples of the people that we saw during our two hour wait, but I think that’s more than enough to illustrate my point. Irresponsibility seems to be an accepted trend by far too many people in our society.
Now, I understand that there are millions of people in this country who have found themselves unexpectedly out of work these past years, and that they, like Kim, have no choice but to resort to the free clinics to care for themselves and their children. As a matter of fact, there was one woman who told Kim and I that if her husband didn’t find work soon she was going to send their daughter (who looked to be about seven years old) to live with her grandmother so the child wouldn’t have to keep coming to “this sort of place.” She was really upset about it. So I understand that not everyone at free clinics are self-appointed human baby factories, I really do, but most of the girls in the place were just that, and apparently I wasn’t alone in my negative opinion of the situation.
Perhaps I’ve just gotten old enough that I’m missing something important here, because I can not comprehend WHY people who obviously can’t provide for themselves continue to bring more children into the situation, as if it weren’t preventable. And for those of you who are saying, “Shut up bitch, what do you know?“ I DO know, because my own son was a result of a reckless moment with the lead singer of a rock band over twenty years ago, and I myself sat in the same kind of clinics getting free “care” with my baby during the first six months of his life because I didn‘t have the balls to tell his daddy he existed. But somewhere along the line I grew up, opened my eyes, and decided to get my own shit together before I tried to have any more kids. There weren’t as many birth control options back then as there are now, and even if you were using the free clinic you had to still pay for pills and such, but I managed. So I can not figure out why in
this day and age, with so many birth control options that are now given freely at the clinics, why I witnessed what I did today. Is it that difficult to remember to take a free pill? To wear a free patch? Or to go get a free shot? Or are there people out there who truly believe that raising kids on the meager funds that the welfare system provide and dragging them into sub-standard clinics for healthcare is a good way to live?
On a side note, the day was not totally without any form of amusement though. When Kim and I finally were ushered back to an exam room, unsurprisingly enough the first thing the nurse asked her was “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?” Kim is 57 years old.
HURRAH! Brilliant post.
I find it ironic that we live in the 21st century, can split the atom and send men to the moon, yet we still can’t MANAGE BIRTH CONTROL.
The abortion debate? It should be MOOT. We have the knowledge and resources to prevent unwanted pregnancies, instead of terminating them. It’s just a pity the retarded right wing want to keep people in ignorance and totally control people’s reproductive rights.
You know what? I’d like to see everybody fitted with some kind of safe, natural birth control at 13 – and when they want to have a child, they have to have the birth control reversed. Then people would only have children when they WANTED them and were READY for them.
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I am in agreement with the general idea, but there are some factors to consider.
For one, you said all the girls were very young. Any idea what the sex education program is like in the local school system? We’re looking at this from the perspective of women who are grown and well informed when it comes to different methods of contraceptives and hormonal birth control. While ignorance isn’t an awesome excuse, sometimes that’s a lot of what it is.
I wish there were more comprehensive sex ed programs and that parents couldn’t opt to keep their kids from participating in them. The situation you’re seeing is nearly completely preventable and it’s sad. =/
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There’s no reason to be PC here. No matter how shitty sex ed may be in some places, it’s common knowledge that babies can and do result from sex. I’d bet any arbitrary number of dollars that those young folks are surrounded by friends in nearly identical situations not because they’re ignorant but because they’re just plain stupid.
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“young folks are surrounded by friends in nearly identical situations not because they’re ignorant but because they’re just plain stupid.” And do not know how to use BC or abstain from sex until they can get it if they do not want to be pregnant.
Then again you have a lot of young women who want to get pregnant at 16 to be a ‘young mom’ as if it’s some hip logo. They are perfectly fine letting their parents raise their kid for them as ‘they are young and should be in school.’ Stupid parents as well who support the idea of raising their grand children so their teenage daughter can go to parties.
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Yes, some of it is due to ignorance. If you’re in an area with abstinence only or abstinence mostly sex education, then you’re also likely in an area where people’s parents are a bit prudish or shy when it comes to educating their kids about sex. If a collective group of youth is not getting educated by school or their parents then they are going to have some pretty wild ideas about sex. There is an alarming number of teens that believe pulling out or having sex during your period will prevent pregnancy.
I’m not trying to be PC here. I’m being realistic. You can’t always fault people for their ignorance.
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Hi Sarahbear, and thanks for the comment.
You make a valid point, but I think sex education in modern times is MUCH better than it was when I had my own son. The teens and 20-somethings these days are more educated than ever, because people aren’t afraid to talk about birth control any more. Hell, you’d rarely even see a tampon commercial on tv back then, but now they advertise all forms of birth control openly. “Sex education” in the my school was very vague— basically they told you what made you pregnant (complete with cute little drawings of the ovaries and such) and told you not to have sex if you didn’t want it to happen to you. Then they mentioned condoms as a way to keep from getting AIDS. That’s it.
Most of us learned about the pill either from older friends who were on it, and I personally had never even heard of an IUD until my late 20’s.
You mentioned that you wished parents wouldn’t “opt to keep their kids from participating” in the sex ed programs now, and that proves what I’m saying. When I was in school, no parent ever opted their kids out of it because the schools weren’t allowed to tell us jack anyway. Now it has evolved from the “here is why you have a period and how you get pregnant” talk into “here is how you can protect yourself during sex.”
Oh! I think it’s also worth mentioning that back in the “old days” you couldn’t buy condoms over the counter in my area unless you were of age (honestly, it was easier for a 16-year-old to buy cigarettes than condoms then), and you couldn’t get the pill without your mom taking you to the doctor and requesting it. Lots of girls just skipped bc then because they didn’t want to be ‘found out.’
“Or are there people out there who truly believe that raising kids on the meager funds that the welfare system provide and dragging them into sub-standard clinics for healthcare is a good way to live?”
Sadly, there are. My mother spent a great deal of time working in the local “welfare” hospital while in grad school. She actually did her thesis on the culture of a poverty stricken minority community that raises girls with the idea that their “job” should be to have babies and that this will provide them with a good “income” through the welfare system. Their self-esteem is entirely dependent upon their ability to reproduce. The more the better.
It’s seems a bit insane, but she had stories of welfare mothers bringing their 14 year old daughters in to find out if they were pregnant and could apply for their own welfare card.
I think things have changed a bit, with welfare reform limiting how long you can be on welfare at any one time and imposing a lifetime limit as well, but the culture is in place and I imagine, extremely difficult to change.
That, coupled with our fine “abstinence only” sex education program and I am sure many of these people truly lack the information or value system needed to make choices that seem logical and reasonable to those of us raised in an entirely different way.
I agree with you entirely, of course, but sadly, I don’t see this culturally ingrained way of life changing any time soon.
Holy shit that’s scary… people actually encouraging their daughters to believe that having babies is a career. Gads!
Hur-fucking-rah. Shit like this just pisses me off. Even as I read this post and Laurel’s comment and even as I KNOW people think being a baby factory and living off of gov’t assistance and draining their families is somehow desirable.. Hell, even as I look at all the military couples around me who have multiple kids by age of 20 because, yes, their self esteem is also dependent on the ability to reproduce, I just can’t believe it. Even knowing that sex ed really sucks in some places (I know mine wasn’t A+ material here), people know how babies are made long before 16 years of age. I can’t even try to be nice. It just makes me want to smack some fucking sense into people.
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ROFL! That’s exactly how I feel about it, and I was so pissed off by the time I got back from that clinic I just had to say something about it.
Ha, if you want to look at ‘baby factories’ than look at my home country, the UK. We have astonishing rates of teen pregnancies because the welfare state gives young mothers a council house (project housing) and a decent income simply for having kids. We’ve got a whole generation that turn to young motherhood as a career. The problem is, it’s actually easier to make a living doing that than trying to earn your own way on an overtaxed low-income or lower-middle-class job in the UK. It’s a self-perpetuating nightmare.
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I agree whole heartedly with the sentiment here. However, having worked in a community agency, I was, for the first time, exposed to a large number of people living well below the poverty line. Many of them have babies. They had them young. They had them fast. I grew up in a middle/upper-middle class neighborhood not 20 miles from some of these people. Hardly anyone in my graduating class of 800 has done the same.
There is a definite correlation between SES and use of birth control. I don’t know if it has to do with the type of sex-ed available, the fact that they feel they can’t afford birth control (or the abortion when they get pregnant; though the other day, I had a pregnant client who said the $350 abortion was too much. So we calculated $350 vs a lifetime of paying for a child. She decided she could find the money), the family support that they have at home… or a combination of all of those factors.
I will say that I applauded a client of mine whose 17-year-old had a baby and then got pregnant with her second child when her kid was 2 months or so old (2 different dads, the first dad bounced on her, the second is incarcerated). My client marched her 19-year-old daughter into the doctor’s office after the second one was born and said, “Clearly she’s not responsible enough to do it herself, so what kind of birth control do you have that she doesn’t have to control herself?” They put an IUD in– good for 10 years. Granted, it won’t protect against STDs, but it was good to see someone trying to help combat their daughter’s careless behavior.
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Wow you said this out loud! Good for you! I call out stupidity too. A lot of ignorance going on.
When I got my abortion last year I was amazed at the group of women I waited with for my turn.
The people working at the clinic were rabidly pushing hormonal birth control at every woman there. YES it’s nice we have so many options but wow hormonal birth control can be insidious!
I wish more men had vasectomies!
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I just want to thank you for so casually mentioning your abortion unapologetically and factually. I do the same thing about mine, and people always look at me like I just told them the dude sitting next to me raped me last night. They can’t believe I talk about it like it’s this actual thing that I did, and that’s part of my past, and that’s okay.
<3
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