Bristol Palin PSA puts price on motherhood

By Angela Penny
The Guardsman

The ninth annual National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy is May 5th, so get those Hallmark cards ready.

This year Candie’s shoes produced a public service announcement with Bristol Palin hypothetically portraying what her life as a teen mom would be like if she “didn’t come from a famous family,” adding “it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Candie’s approach would have been far more effective had it not glamorized such a serious social issue.

As Palin talks, stuff disappears from the apartment set she’s standing in and her clothes change. By the end it still doesn’t look all that bad.

In jeans and without makeup, she’s standing in a freshly painted medium sized apartment with hardwood floors, a window, a comfortable couch and a lamp. Her plump toddler is standing nearby wearing only a diaper. At this point she delivers the carefully crafted catchphrase, “pause before you play.”

The slogan, which substitutes word-play for meaning, seems purposefully ambiguous. As Bristol explained on “Good Morning America”, “It could be pause and go get a condom … or it could even be pause and wait until marriage.”

Both options involve more action and time than inferred by the word “pause”. And deeming “play” as a new code word for sex seems dangerous — like using the word “candy” as a substitute for cocaine.

Most teenage mothers have a better chance of appearing on “The Maury Povich Show” than guest-starring on a prime-time TV show. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reports that 30 percent of US girls get pregnant at least once before the age of 20.

“Pause before you play” tries to appease both religious conservatives who believe in abstinence-only and those who say prevention education is key.

Many attribute the increase in teen pregnancy to abstinence-only sexual education limitations.

In 2009 the younger Palin told CNN that telling young people to be abstinent is “not realistic at all.”

The quality of a teen mom’s experience does not depend on the fame of her family. It depends on whether her parents are willing to assume responsibility for helping to raise the child; it depends on whether she has a place to live and the quality of her education.

Upper middle-class teen moms have a hard time — they miss prom, don’t get to go away to college and find it more difficult to develop a romantic relationship — but many have it far harder.

There currently is an epidemic of teen pregnancy among former foster youth. Almost half of women under age 19 who spent time in foster care have at least one child, according to a Time magazine article published last July.

“Having a child is a way to create a family that they don’t have, or to fill an emotional void,” University of Chicago researcher Amy Dworsky said in the article.

Most teenage girls assume that they’ll have a baby, marry the father and live happily ever after. Only after the child’s birth do they realize how idealized the fairy-tale perception they had envisioned was.

When you’re 16 years old, forever is a foreign concept.

Babies aren’t toys or puppies; they’re people. And it’s really not fair for a baby to be born to people that can’t take care of them by themselves. That feeling of undying love and an unbreakable bond with another is universally tempting, but part of growing up is learning how to establish a relationship with oneself. It’s not fair to have a baby for your own emotional neediness.

Those who are born into less than ideal emotionally supportive situations need to break that chain by becoming fully independent and learning to love themselves. A baby isn’t the answer.