Bringing Up Baby

To most Americans, T.C. Williams High School is best remembered as home of the heroic football team in Remember the Titans. In yesterday’s Washington Post, however, one of Williams’ teachers highlights a real-life drama on Virginia’s famous campus—the growing number of teen parents. The article, “They’re Having Babies. Are We Helping?” takes a pointed look at how public education is condoning-and in most cases, facilitating-the spike in high school pregnancies.

Throughout the piece, Patrick Welsh ticks off the so-called “preventative” measures in his school—the comprehensive sex education, the Adolescent Health Center, which distributes birth control at will, and the teen workshops that preach “getting pregnant is a disaster.”

But none seem to combat the growing number—and acceptance—of unwed sexual activity. “There is zero shame,” says school nurse Nancy Runtan. Clearly, the contraceptive crusade, advocated by so many in Congress, is not working.

T.C. Williams is doing everything the Left prescribes with very little to show for it. “Once a girl gets pregnant,” Welsh writes, “the school leaps in to do everything for her…[I]s it possible that all this assistance—with little or no comment about the kids’ actions—has the unintended effect of actually encouraging them to get pregnant?”

According to one poll (National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancies 2004), nearly every teenager (94 percent) would welcome the abstinence message.

Tony Perkins heads the Family Research Council. This article is excerpted from the Washington Update that he compiles for the FRC.