Lost, Unwanted, and High

I currently work in an inpatient substance abuse rehabilitation program for teenagers in the Hillsborough and Polk County areas of West Central Florida. The program is co-ed, and currently the girls outnumber the boys. When it was the other way around many of the young women felt that their voice would not be heard so they mostly kept silent about their issues and just went through the motions of doing what they had to do behaviorally to graduate from the program. Now that the tables have turned, the girls are speaking up more and talking about the traumas they’ve suffered.

Many of the girls I work with fall into the 38% of all women who have been raped between the ages of 14-17 years old. Many come from broken homes or single parent homes where the mother of the household is an active drug user herself or allows men to come into the home who are users. Many of these men will assault or abuse their “step-daughters,” thus send said ladies on a tailspin of self-destruction.

Every other week I meet with these parents in either a family support meeting or in an individual family session. On occasion they will tell me when their children can’t hear them, that they never wanted children in the first place. It isn’t enough that many of these girls hate themselves but they are carrying the extra shame of knowing that their mother hates them as well. It isn’t enough that they wish they’d never been born, but they are also carrying the shame of knowing that their mother also wishes they’d never been born.

I begin many of my sessions reminding the parents that our program is not a babysitting service and that the time for planning for their child to re-enter the home begins almost as soon as the child enters our 6-month rehabilitation center. I always say, 6 months goes by in the blink of an eye and there’s no time to waste in making changes in the home environment. However, there’s not much one can do to help these families set goals for reunification when the mother tells their daughter that they don’t want them home in the first place.

This theme prompted a conversation between one group home behavioral technician and myself about how nearly impossible it is for us to help these kids when the most important people in the world to them have ostensibly cast them into the wilderness. At the end of the conversation I said the staff member, “If I had only one wish, it would be that from now on, women that don’t want or cannot take of a child would no longer bring children into this world.”

According to a new survey, my wishes are far from coming true. The survey shows that, “U.S. women of childbearing age who were surveyed in 2002 revealed that 14 percent of their recent births were unwanted at the time of conception, federal researchers said Monday.

In a similar 1995 survey, only 9 percent were unwanted at the time of conception.”

It would appear, though the survey says that the correlation is inconclusive, that the reason there are more unwanted babies being brought into the world is because less and less women, for a variety of reasons are having abortions.

From the same survey, “At least one anti-abortion group said the numbers reflect a national “pro-life shift,” while others who research reproductive health issues suggested it might mean less access to abortion.

The latest findings are consistent with the falling rate of abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit group that researches reproductive health issues.

In 1995, for every 100 births that ended in abortion or a birth, almost 26 ended in abortion. In 2002, 24 ended in abortion, according to Guttmacher data.

That information seems to be in synch with the federal data released Monday, said Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s associate director for domestic research.

“The two statistics together suggest — but don’t confirm — that a greater percentage of unintended pregnancies resulted in births rather than abortions,” Finer said.”

I’m not an advocate of abortion by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve often argued that any legalized, justified, or sanctified effort to kill your fellow man is an abomination and should only be reserved for the most severest of circumstances. I don’t believe the death penalty should used under any circumstances. While I realize perfectly well that not every criminal can nor should be rehabilitated, I’ve yet to see a cogent argument for the death penalty that holds up against life imprisonment and hard labor.

Euthanasia, while it has been argued as an act of mercy for terminally ill folks or the elderly in considerable and irreversible pain, I believe is also ethically wrong. The propensity for our culture to abuse assisted suicide is too great, in my opinion, to allow in any civilized society.

Getting back to abortion, unless bringing the child to term will result in the death of the mother or said mother is pregnant as the result of a sexual assault, I believe it is unethical to have an abortion. However, on this issue I’m also a states rightist, thus I believe the legality of abortion should be left up to the majority of tax-paying voters.

Unfortunately, for whatever the reasons are that women are having less abortions and instead more unwanted babies, that only means that there are bound to be more girls using methamphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and in the case of one 11-year-old girl, heroin, to numb the trauma of never being wanted in the first place being born into this world. Now the question becomes, which is the greater evil; killing an unborn child or birthing a child that will inevitably have her soul murdered before her body dies from a drug overdose or God only knows?

It’s not an easy question to answer. As most important issues are, the matter is complicated. What is more precious, the life of the many or the life of the one?