My first friend to have a baby was, Monica. We were 17 at the time and when my mother heard the news, she sighed and looked incredibly sad as she said, “Well, I guess her life is over.”

I have to admit, at the time, I kind of agreed with her. I mean, I knew that teen moms were less likely to finish school, more likely to be poor, and that their kids disproportionately faced long term hardships.

In the end, however, Monica’s life wasn’t over. She had to grow up fast, to be sure. And she experienced challenges that I wasn’t going to encounter for almost 15 years. But last I’d heard, she and her son were doing well. She had recently gotten married and had a decent job. He was in high school, and thinking about what he wanted to do next.

Of course, Monica’s wasn’t the only tale of teen parenting that didn’t turn out disastrously. Just look at our President Elect. Yup, Obama’s mom was only 18 when he was born! Despite being a young single mom, she went on to get her PhD, and he went on to change the course of history.

So how can teen moms maintain their sanity, finish school, and raise an Obama, instead of say, sinking into poverty and producing a juvenile delinquent? Finding support and community is crucial. So is knowing your rights and exercising them.

One of these rights is your right to attend school. This is protected under a law called Title IX, which makes it illegal to discriminate against teenage parents by forcing them to leave school or enroll in special programs.

This is an important right to take advantage of. Even though it might seem impossible at the time, getting a high school diploma is one of the best ways to give yourself and your child a better shot at a positive future!

You should also know that once you are pregnant or parenting, you are allowed to consent to your own health care and authorize care for your child without involving your parents. This is generally true no matter how young you are.

Resources and support for teen moms are available in many communities. Check with your local hospital or a Planned Parenthood health center to find out about programs in your area.

You can also find information online at places like, Girl-Mom and the Young Mommies Help Site. Another great resource is the website of Katherine Arnoldi, a former teen mom who chronicled her journey in a great comic book and also produced a guide to college for teen parents.

No one says that being a teen mom is an easy route to take. But once a pregnant teen make the decision to parent, that decision should be respected. Teen moms need more help and less stigma. Shifting this balance is one of the best ways to help them and their children defy the bleak statistics we often see screaming from the headlines.

_{Unpublished post, originally written 10/18/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.}

The CDC just reported that 25% of girls have been inoculated against the human papiloma virus since a vaccine became available two years ago.

The same study found that approximately 75 to 90 percent of children got vaccinations like chickenpox, hepatitis B and measles, mumps and rubella.

The difference is that unlike the HPV vaccine, those vaccines are not only required by schools, but they have also been around a lot longer.

Plus, they aren’t associated with sex.

So in some ways, after only two years on the market, a 25% vaccination rate for HPV isn’t terrible.

So what are the fears about the HPV vaccine and sex? Mainly that once a girl gets it, she will feel like she has permission to become sexually active.

Some parents have prevented their daughters from getting it for this reason, as have some schools. That’s right! Catholic schools, both in Canada and in England have banned their students from getting the vaccine, claiming that it was "encouraging sexual promiscuity".

But it is not only overblown fears about sex that stand in the way of higher vaccination rates. Another concern has been the cost. If your insurance doesn’t cover it, the vaccine is pretty expensive (over $300).

Some people are also worried about side effects. There have been anecdotal reports of really serious things like extreme pain and even paralysis. There has been no concrete proof that there is a direct link between these situations and the vaccine, and the CDC claims that the vaccine, "was studied in thousands of females (ages 9 through 26 years)   around the world and its safety continues to be monitored by CDC and the   FDA. Studies have found no serious side effects. The most common side effect is soreness in the arm (where the shot is given). There have recently been some reports of fainting in teens after they got the vaccine." But many people are still worried.

My real concern with the vaccine is not that girls who get it will start wantonly having unprotected sex with every guy they come across, or that they will suffer a rare side effect. Rather, I am concerned that after getting the shot, a lot of girls won’t realize they still need to get pap smears.

This is important because the HPV vaccine doesn’t offer 100% protection from HPV. It offers 70% protection. 70% is a pretty good number. But it’s not a guarantee. Because of this, it is still a good idea to get pap smears as often as your health care recommends.

Getting the HPV vaccine is a personal choice, and it’s not one everyone will be comfortable with. But I’d be interested to learn how the numbers really break down. How many girls aren’t getting it because their parents won’t let them? How many find cost a barrier? How many fear side effects? And how many just don’t see the need? 

If you have any insight, I’d love to hear it!

_{Unpublished post, originally written 10/28/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.}

When I was in high school my boyfriend, Cam cheated on me.

The first time it happened, I heard about it from my friend, Angie, who pulled me aside at a party to give me the bad news. I burst into tears, and confronted Cam. But he masterfully denied that anything had happened and convinced me that Angie was just trying to break us up.

“I didn’t want to tell you, Ellen,” he said, “But she’s come on to me when you weren’t around.”

Needless to say, Angie and I were never close again.

Soon after that, my friend Tammy, told me that Cam had hit on her one night.  Again, I confronted Cam, yelling at him on the bus home and telling him we were through. 

“Tammy’s such a slut,” Cam fumed.  "I can’t believe you’d take her word over mine.  You know she’s just jealous of our relationship.”

He made the same excuses when my friend Monica told me he had hit on her. And when Jen told me they made out.

As with each previous time, I would start out angry at Cam, and end up angry at my girlfriend.

Finally, in the middle of 12th grade, two and a half years into our relationship, Cam’s roommate, Mandy took me out for coffee.

"Ellen," she said. "You know Cam cheats on you?"  She gave me a list of names and told me that he’d had girls over to the apartment they shared.

At that point, I couldn’t deny the situation any longer.

Mandy had a serious boyfriend, was in college, and seemed totally together. I knew she would have had no reason to be interested in my deadbeat boyfriend, who at 19, had yet to finish high school, and was often late with his rent.

Far from being jealous of my relationship, (which Cam often claimed motivated my friends to "make up" his cheating ways), I was pretty sure Mandy just felt sorry for me.

But until that point, it had been so much easier for me to simply blame the girls who told me about Cam, rather than to blame him. Though some of them were close friends, Cam managed to convince me that it was them and not him who were betraying me.

Sadly, I think my experience is pretty typical. Often, girls can’t bear the thought that their boyfriends might actually be cheating, and end up living in a world of denial. Acknowledging the cheating would force them to question every aspect of their relationship and their own self-worth. It would also be likely lead to a break-up, and break-ups can seem even scarier than the nagging suspicion that your beloved hasn’t been faithful.

Blaming the girl who your guy cheats with, or the one who tells you about the situation, means that you can vent your anger at someone while excusing your guy’s behavior. It allows you to maintain the illusion that it’s the two of you against a world that simply doesn’t understand.

After talking to Mandy, I finally broke up with Cam. Much to my surprise, once it was over, I never regretted ending the relationship.

Sure, I was left with a bad case of low self-esteem, an appointment for an HIV test, and friendships that were broken beyond repair. But I was also left with a pretty good radar for manipulation, a low tolerance for lame excuses, and the knowledge that I would never again let myself be put in that situation. 

Though the saying goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I wish I had realized at the time that that strength could have still been gained even if I had ended the relationship the first time I heard Cam was a cheater, and not the one hundred and first.

_{Unpublished post, originally written 8/24/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.}

The summer after grade 11 I left my boyfriend Jim at home and hopped on a plane with 40 other kids. We were bound for Three Rivers, Michigan to spend 6 weeks doing a leadership training program at a summer camp.  The program turned out to be a bit of a joke (we learned a lot more about smoking cigarettes than we did about being leaders of tomorrow).  There was, however, one event that stood out for me.

One of our roles as budding leaders was to run avtivities for the campers. So once a week we were assigned partners and told to come up with a thought-provoking session for kids.

Most of my activities had involved silly games or baking cookies. But this time I was assigned to work with a girl named Becky. Becky wore green Doc Martins, came to Three Rivers armed with a stack of books by authors I had never heard of, and had a great idea for an activity.  We would get the kids to analyze songs to see if they were sexist. 

To do so we collected a bunch of songs like Guns ‘N Roses, Used to Love Her, the Beastie Boys, Girls and the Beatles Run for Your Life. Then we made a mix tape (remember this was the nineties), got our assigned kids together and pressed play.  Afterwards we played them Fugazi’s, Suggestion, which was about sexual harassment, to counter the messages of the previous songs.

Now I don’t know if the eight-year-olds we were working with actually got a lot out of our session.  But I certainly did. 

Though had lead Becky to believe I was as aware of this issue as she was, the idea of listening to music for the message was actually pretty new to me. But it also was something that I had been thinking about more and more. Mainly, that was because of a really uncomfortable experience I’d had at a concert the previous spring.

It was the Public Enemy / Anthrax show (again, blame the decade!). I went with Jim and some of his guy friends. As the bands belted out some early version of a rock / rap hybrid, three women came out on stage. They were wearing thong bikinis and heels. They didn’t sing or dance or play an instrument. Instead, they strutted around the stage as the bands encouraged the crowd to scream, "Pussy! Pussy!"

I was 16 and aside from the women on stage, I felt like the only female there. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood miserably, smoking, as everyone around me chanted.

That concert ended any interest I had in rock / rap.

However, it wasn’t until Becky’s dissection of lyrics, and her introduction to bands that sang politically and socially charged songs, that I realized just how prevalent sexism was in music, and that it was possible to find bands I liked that didn’t make me uncomfortable.

It’s not that I poured over lyric sheets before buying new music after that. But thinking about the issue definitely made me more conscious of what I listened to, and which bands I supported.

And I’m happy to report that since then, I have never again found myself stranded in the middle of a crowd as a band whipped the audience into a screaming frenzy of misogyny. Of course, I’m also happy to report that I never again played Guns ‘N Roses for eight year olds…

Have you ever had an experince like mine? Do you care about lyrics in music?

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_{Unpublished post, originally written 8/24/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.}

Remember when Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears were the poster children for virginity?  Clearly things have changed with those two. Simpson is now divorced and dating a football player. And Spears, well, you all know what she’s been up to.

Following in their footsteps comes the next generation of celebrity virgins.  First up, American Idol, Jordin Sparks.

told Us Magazine that she has worn a True Love Waits purity ring since she was 13 and explained, “Temptation is always there. It’s hard everyday, but I made a promise to myself. "  Her take on virginity sounds pretty familiar.

However, the Jonas Brothers, who also wear their chastity publicly, are charting some new territory simply by being male.

In an interview with Details magazine last winter, the brothers proudly showed off their purity rings and explained they wear them as "promises to ourselves and to God that we’ll stay pure till marriage."

Because virginity isn’t expected from young male celebrities, the Brothers have had to endure their share of ribbing. The most recent incident occurred at the VMAs when the host wondered why the Brothers weren’t using their fame to score. 

Going on stage shortly after, Sparks came to their defense. "I just have one thing to say about promise rings. It’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody – guy or girl – wants to be a slut."

Now I have no problem with the personal choice not to have sex. Or the tactics people use to make that choice a reality. What I do have a problem with are comments like the one made by Sparks.

Why is sex simply an either or thing?  Why is it that you are either proclaiming your virginity to the world with your purity ring, or you’re a big old slut?

Sure "not everybody wants to be a slut." But here’s a newsflash for Jordin, not everyone who has sex is.

Almost half of all American teens are sexually active. But of those, only 14% had sex with 4 or more people, and over 65% use condoms. Doesn’t sound all that slutty to me. Of course, I never took a virginity pledge, and I have a feeling that my views on the matter are probably a little different than people who have. 

Celebrities love to embrace causes, and that’s fine. But I’d rather they didn’t use their platform to diminish teens whose choices differ. 

What do you think about celebrity virginity pledges? Are they admirable? Annoying? Neither?

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