"Daddy, I'm pregnant." Rinse, repeat.

I grew up in Appalachia. In seventh grade (I was 12), there were four eighth graders who were pregnant. In seventh grade, I had friends who'd already had sex.

Self-fulfilling, maybe, but better that than a mother at 16.

 

Dirk, not trying to rip you, but having this convo at 16 meant it took place long after the horsies were gone from the barn.

 

Knowing the area where HH works, this thread topic does not surprise me one damn bit.

 

Yeah, there are no teenaged girls getting pregnant in Boston.

Or New York.

Or Chicago.

Or Cleveland.

Or Albuquerque.

Just down here amongst us shit-kickers.

 

Not knocking your fine city, HH.

And don't drag Boston into this discussion. "We've" got enough to worry with the Red Sox.

 

My 18-year-old cousin found out she has a bun in the oven recently. Shotgun wedding is set for December. Yee-hah!

 

Even a vasectomy isn't fool-proof. My dad had one after I, his third child, was born. Six years later, I had a little brother, and my dad got his second operation.

 

This reminded me of my dad's double standard when my sister and I were growing up.

My dad doesn't say boo to a ghost, but I'll never forget his lone one-liner...I was in college and telling my mom my girlfriend and I might end up staying at a hotel when we went to visit the Baseball HOF. Mom kept harping on the fact that we had a bunch of friends from school in that area and we should stay up there with one of them. It was my Catholic mom refusing to accept the obvious.

My dad walks by, hears all this and goes "Aww, come on hon. He's gotta try it before he buys it."

I was speechless. My mother's face grew beet red.

"Right BYH? Try it before you buy it?" Dad is grinning as wide a grin as I've ever seen. I start to smile and laugh and nod.

"That's not funny! That's not funny at all!" my mom says and storms up the stairs.

"Try it before you buy it!" Dad says, laughs and goes into the living room, where he promptly regained his cloak of silence. Still the single funniest thing that's ever happened in my house.

Now my sister, on the other hand? Oh my goodness. He was fucking psychotic about her. Like the Friday morning he decided to work from home instead of going into the office. He's in the living room filling out paper work or something and the door opens. He calls my mom's name. "Hi Mr. ____," says my sister's boyfriend. Hoo boy. Apparently she'd given him a key or the garage door opener and he was coming over to...see...my sister.

Dad went apeshit, kicked him out of the house and read my sister the riot act. Had she not been in college, he probably would have grounded her. Took my future brother-in-law forever to come back from that one. Of course, now he's making six figures and helps my dad out anytime he has a problem with his desktop, which is six times a day, so I think Dad is over it.

As for me, I wish I knew how to operate the machinery in high school. You lucky bastards!

 

A friend of my wife had two abortions in high school and then got pregnant by a man my wife's friend simply calls "the sperm doner."

My wife and this friend are polar opposites - thank goodness.

 

I grew up in the most white-bred, conservitive town in ohio (ok, maybe not. but it had to be close), but we had sex education starting in 4th grade and going on after that. So at least they were smart in that.
All through middle and high school i only know of 1 girl who got pregnant (a school of 1,600-ish, but more kids than that becuase, of course, old ones left and new ones came in my tenure ) which seems like a pretty good success rate.

 

I grew up in BFE, where we had the pregnant girls in middle school and all that.

But my family didn't "do" sex ed. To this day I've never heard my parents say the "s" word. When I was seven I was given a book about where babies come from, but there was no out-loud discussion. They skipped the puberty lesson, too, meaning I was the poor girl who thought I had cancer the first time I got my period.

Everything I learned was from TV or, um, practical experience. Parents, don't let that happen to your kids. Have those conversations.

 

I'll give you that 'Amen' you're looking for. That's almost a mirror image of my experience growing up ... save for the whole period thing, of course.

When I started asking questions, I got "You're smart, you'll figure it out" in response.