Justice
Boys Are Finally Part of the Plan to Lower Teen Pregnancy Rates
A new counseling program aimed specifically at young men has its work cut out.
In 2012, University of Missouri sociologist Jennifer Beggs Weber set out to know how much responsibility teen dads take for their partners’ pregnancies. In interviews with 26 young fathers in a Midwest city where teen birth rates were higher than average, she found that 22 faulted the mother for the pregnancy. The other four pointed fingers at circumstance, parents, or a doctor. Their explanations were all, in some way, gendered.
“It’s just one of those things where you just wanna have sex,” one 16-year-old told Weber, having explained the pregnancy as an accident. “You’re not thinking of anything else... I mean… I’m a guy, you know… ."