Educate the girls
Once upon a time–back when I (now 65) was in middle school– there was a young adult book that got made into a movie. Both the movie and the book were called, “Mr. and Mrs. Bobo Jones”:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/911892.Mr_and_Mrs_Bo_Jo_Jones
“Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones is a 1967 novel written by Ann Head. It was initially marketed to an adult audience but was marketed as a young adult novel for its paperback release the following year. The work, along with S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, is credited with launching new realism in young adult literature.” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_and_Mrs_Bo_Jo_Jones
I didn’t know anything about “launching new realism” for young adults; all I knew was the topic of getting pregnant as a teenager was just becoming something folks talked about.
I was in the 10th grade when the T.V. movie version of Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones came out. I had already read the book in 8th grade. I was attending a very white, newly integrating public high school outside of Washington, D.C. and what I saw was deeply disturbing. During my three years there, two girls were impregnated by their Dickhead boyfriends. Translation (for the language of Queer correct launguage policing) two persons assigned female at birth and cis-gendered in heteronormative sexual relationships with two persons assigned male at birth (and also cis-gendered) got KNOCKED UP.
The pregnant mothers were both white.
Both of the fathers were Black.
Both girls kept the babies. The white parents kicked both daughters out of their homes. The parents of the Black fathers took each girl in, and supported them through the pregnancies.
The girls left school after the birth of their babies, and that was that.
Not at ALL like what I had read or seen in either the book or the movie about teens trying to begin a family. We of the Class of 1974 got no follow up on their lives, as the book addresses the hardships of parenting. I wondered about those two girls and theri babies. I know the boys didn’t marry them.
Mr. and Mrs BoJo Jones had been a cautionary tale for me.
The inter-racial dating dramas I described above were major lunchtime entertainment for my high school. Each day, as Popular Inter-racial Couple #1 left the cafeteria, groupies would swarm out of the cafeteria after them. The couple would be positioning themselves somewhere semi-public to make out before the bell rang for beginning after lunch class period; the Eager Voyeurs followed in the hopes of obtaining some vicarious thrills. This was the ultimate taboo; not just dating across racial lines, but MAKING OUT.
This was exactly what the white supremacists had warned would happen!
I also attended a fancy progressive private school during 7th and 8th grade, and there was a pregnancy in one of the high schoolers several years ahead of me. Like the voyeurism and vicarious thrills of the lunch crowd agt my public school, my group of friends and I would hang on every word of this sophisticated older girl and her deepening dating/ sexual experiences with “Chuckie”; her boyfriend. I was Black. She was Black. The other girls listening were Black. The boyfriend was Black. Or stated correctly, her GROOMER was Black, because this guy was engaging in statutory rape (he was in his early twenties, and she was fifteen). Once pregnant, this girl quietly left the school. I often wonder what would have happened, if I had “told” on the girl involved to ANY adult in that school, before she got pregnant.
It was exactly what “Bougie” Black parents said would happen to Black girls if we hung out with guys “from the Hood”!
I share these stories because these three pregnancies happened. They happened, even though lots of cautionary information was available. They happened, as the victims danced through stereotypes of risks of racial pollution and loss of class status.
And, the harm done to all three persons assigned female who were the WOMB CARRIERS of the children was much more significant than what happened to the persons assigned male at birth who provided the sperm.
Those are dramas from fifty years ago.
I share now, because not enough has changed over those fifty years. In my Queer communities–“educating womb owning people aka women” is definitely underappreciated. Over the past five years, I have anecdotal stories of five unplanned pregnancies among Queer “post-binary’ or trans couples and it has been the womb owning person (aka woman) who is left with more than a 50% share of both the decision-making for next steps (as SHOULD be the case) and more than 50% of the responsibility when the pregnancy is kept (which remains the FEMALE CONDITION)
So “Educate the GIRLS” is my rallying cry; calling in ongoing consciousness that we remain female bodies in a Patriarchy that uses racism, classism and ignorance to control our behaviors.
I hope to share many, many stories and skills for how to stay awake and learn what we girls need to know to not just survive, but to THRIVE.