“World
of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml
A
“social-impact report”? We
have heard of “environmental-impact report”;
for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of
our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.
A social-impact report would talk about the probable and possible
social consequences of a planned or existing activity.
Before a social-impact
report could be written, the affected group has to be well understood.
The author below says that society has misunderstood a young
woman’s desire for motherhood.
“Gloucester
Girls Gone Wild"
Why they did it.
From City Journal,
Kay S. Hymowitz, 23 June 2008
The
nation’s latest what’s-the-matter-with-kids-today story comes from Gloucester,
Massachusetts, and it’s a jaw-dropper.
According to Time, a group of 15- and
16-year-old girls at Gloucester
High School made a “pregnancy pact”—an agreement that they would all get pregnant
and then raise their kids together.
And at least on the first part of the
pledge, they’ve evidently been successful, with one of the baby mamas
choosing a 24-year-old homeless guy as her co-parent. ...
The
dominant narrative may have had some truth to it in the pre–Madonna/Paris
Hilton era. But it ignores several key changes in contemporary teenaged
life—changes that the Gloucester
posse has graciously illustrated for us. First, many young women who become
pregnant these days either want to have a baby (as in Gloucester) or are, at the very least, open to the idea.
In order for birth control to
work, you have to use it religiously, and the only way you use it
religiously is if you really, really don’t want to get pregnant.
Yet
researchers like Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefelas in “Promises I Can Keep”
find that’s not the case for many low-income mothers.
They describe young
women who speak longingly about the “joys of motherhood” and who find
the middle-class penchant for putting off motherhood until the later
twenties incomprehensible.
...
In
the past, the problem was held at bay by a combination of sexual reticence,
social disapproval, and a no-baby-without-marriage rule, since it wasn’t
easy to find a presentable boy ready to sign on to a life sentence at 16. No
more. Sexual reticence is now deemed something on the order of a Victorian
perversion.
Social disapproval?
Nowhere evident. ... http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0623kh.html
August 14, 2008