Poor people

True but in our grandparents generation and even our parents generation one was able to simply graduate high school and begin working a career earning enough income to support a family. Hell my father comes from a family of 12, only my grandfather worked while my grandmother took care of the children. Yeah they were poor, sort of hard not to be raising 12 kids, but they had a home and food on the table every night.

You can't do that nowadays, one child alone is enough to ruin your entire life if you aren't prepared for it in the year 2018.

 

This is actually a pretty accurate. A lot of the times having kids makes you poor. A lot of these young people can barely afford to take care of themselves, adding a child to the mix just pushes them right over the poverty edge. I have plenty of friends from my high school days who are simply screwed right now due to having kids at such a young age. Good friend of mine was doing well for herself, attending college, working, etc. Got pregnant, classic story of falling in love and wanting to live happily ever after with some guy at age 20. The guy took off running immediately upon figuring out he was going to be a dad at 21 years old. Fast forward decades later and she is STILL stuck in our same little home town due to joint custody of her child and still works the same low paying job. Basically that kid screwed up her entire life and she has been stuck in a revolving door of poverty ever since.

A lot of these problems revolve around poor life decisions on the part of young people. You can't tell young folks nothing, they know everything (sort of like what our parents said about us). They believe that they have found everlasting love at 18 years old. Many have fantasies of living happily ever after so soon in life, starting a family, believing that the young 21 year old guy with the hot rod actually loves you and will be there forever to raise a family etc. It's sad but it's reality, I have many friends from high school, every single one of the female friends I still talk to are single mothers, every single one. Because they all fell into the aforementioned trap that so many young people fall into. Dumb decisions that sound good at the time are what cause a lot of these poverty issues.

I don't buy the access to birth control thing nor the access to abortions. Condoms are free, even if you buy them from the store lets not pretend that condoms are expensive. It's not a lack of access to birth control it's a lack of willingness to use it. Very few of these pregnancies are the result of condoms breaking, they are the result of condoms not being used or any other method of birth control. I won't sit here and pretend otherwise nor entertain any arguments that try to do so.

Pregnancies among the poor are the result of poor life choices, not limited access to birth control.

I have a lot of young cousins around this critical young age and I tell them all the time, wear a condom. I always hear the same excuses of how it doesn't feel the same, heat of the moment, "we're both clean" etc. This may sound cold hearted but STD's are the least of your damn concerns. If you don't wear protection then you better hope that an STD is all you end up with.

But as I said before, young folks know everything, and many of my young family are running around with children of their own that we the taxpayers support financially because they are unable to do so themselves. And sadly many of them honestly don't see anything actually wrong with that.

 

Well from what I have read I believe that teen pregnancies are actually on the decline (don't quote me on this but I believe it's true based on what I read months ago). So I believe sex education and a multitude of other factors are helping.

I agree about birth control. That has a negative effect on many women, the women in my previous relationships throughout the years all had ill effects from taking a variety of birth control pills and the IUD (sp?). Nobody should ever be forced to use such devices. However, condoms are still available as well as other safe sex practices.

Now granted I'm not saying folks shouldn't have sex until marriage or any of that nonsense. This is the real world, people have sex for pleasure, people have sex well before marriage for pleasure, people have multiple partners, etc. This is how the world is, not the fantasy world that many wish it was to where we all marry as virgins and have sex after marriage and all of those "traditional" practices from generations past. Real world isn't like that anymore and it's not going back to that probably ever. Best we can do is educate safe sex practices and as you said educate young folks on the consequences of bearing children.

Sex education in school is a good thing in my opinion. We had sex ed in school and it was the "scared straight" version where they spent a week showing us grotesque images of late stage STD's and basically made it seem as though if you had sex without protection you would spontaneously combust and die on the spot. There was little discussion on the child bearing aspect of it, it was primarily just showing extreme cases of STD's that we all thought are what happened to you automatically if you dared not wear a condom. This was all well before the age of the internet and it made us middle schoolers never want to have sex period. It was extreme and I don't believe it needs to go that far, but nonetheless it worked that's for sure. I was afraid to even hug a girl after that class lol.

I believe in todays age of higher education requirements to even get a decent job and rising inflation we need to focus sex education on the financial aspect of bearing children. As you said, the film about "Kids cost this much" should be shown as well as a very in depth discussion about just how screwed you will be if you have a baby at this stage in life. Back in my day "scared straight" meant terrifying us about STD's and making us think we'd all die if we had unprotected sex. Today's kids need to be "scared straight" in regards to the financial responsibility of having a baby. I believe that many young folks just flat out don't really understand just how much money it costs to live in the modern world, let alone raise a child in the modern world. Implement programs that make it very clear just how screwed you will be and I believe that will do well in being this generations "scared straight".