The latest trend among teenage girls is, apparently, to have a "prom baby." The idea is that girls try to get pregnant on prom night. This sneaky tactic allows them to avoid the pressure of going to college. Instead they substitute the pressure of raising a child.
This trend was reported by a "Worried Dad" who
recently wrote in to Dear Abby. He writes:
I first heard about it while driving my teenage daughter to a lacrosse meet with several of her girlfriends. One girl in the car, "Carrie," said she hoped this year she could have a prom baby. The girls were discussing two former classmates from last year's lacrosse team who had been unable to begin college because they had both become mothers at 17. Both had deliberately planned to get pregnant on prom night -- hence the term, "prom baby." Abby, both of the girls were studious and hard-working with bright futures ahead of them. One had been accepted to several Ivy League schools. Needless to say, their parents were devastated, and many adjustments had to be made for the new babies.
I'm thinking that either the letter writer was deliberately trying to start a new urban legend, or his daughter's friends were pulling his leg. I have a hard time believing anyone would be stupid enough to think that raising a kid is easier than going to college.
And as
one blogger points out, "If they really wanted to sabotage their own chances of going to college, wouldn't they just submit a poor application?"
I think "prom babies" should be classified as an urban legend of the "shocking sexual behavior of teenage girls" variety, along with other legends such as
Jelly Bracelet Sex Codes and
Rainbow Parties.
Comments
However, I did have a friend who grew up in Indiana. Her grandmother use to tell her to make sure she got knocked up by the time she graduated high school so the "lucky" boy would have to marry her and she could start her life as a housewife. My friend ended up going to college instead, but not without extreme disappointment on her grandmothers side. Apparently purposely getting pregnant to encourage a marriage before high school graduation really isn't that uncommon in the Hoosier state.
No there isn't. Good grief, how big of a sucker are you?
Sometimes they'll organise parties where a woman will have sex with as many men as she can, so that she can get pregnant (they get more money from Welfare for each child they have). And since they can't say for sure who the child is, the men don't have to pay child support (and perhaps being a single mother without a clue who the husband is pays better in Welfare?).
There were some arrests a few years back where a couple of these happened involving under-aged girls.
I asked her whether college or kids were more stressful. She actually said that, for her, going to college was more stressful than raising two kids on her own. And that wasn't an Ive League school. I just don't get it.
And why wouldn't anyone want to go to college? Away from home for the first time, you get to spend your money how you like, live how you like, make new friends, go to outrageous parties - it was amazing! And many UK university now have creches, so the lucky girls can have a prom baby and still go to uni!
As a high school teacher who works with teens every day, I am sorry to say that I can promise you that this is NOT an urban legend.
But what firmly convinces me that this is a UL is the fact that "PROM baby" is a real term, used in neonate units in hospitals, but it has nothing to do with high school dances. "PROM" stands for "prelabor rupture of membranes," and it is a cause of premature birth as well as fetal death, and can happen if the mother is in a car accident, or exeriences another trauma, or for no determined reason. What happens is that the woman's water breaks before the baby is ready for delivery, and she has not had any signs of labor (ie, contractions, dilated cervix, et al.) The uterine environment is then very vulnerable to infection, and the baby has to come out.
I wonder if some kids didn't stumble across the term "PROM baby," then invent a meaning for it, and pass it off as fact, a little like "TIP" meaning "to insure proper service."
While we know it's no urban myth that poor, wretched C-student girls often get pregnant on purpose, or that rich girls sometimes get pregnant unintentionally, or that smart boys and girls being pushed in one direction only by adults sometimes balk and sabotage their grades and thus their chances for college, that doesn't mean getting pregnant TO AVOID COLLEGE is anything more than a freak incident in society. If it's ever happened at all. (Wouldn't we have heard about it before? After all, kids who don't like adult responsibilities wouldn't like the idea of childrearing any more than four more years of school.)
BTW, some may actually find this useful: "The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education" by teacher Grace Llewellyn. There are 74 Amazon reviews and the average rating is very high! Only 8 ratings are lower than 4 stars. I think it was originally published in the 1980s.
Read it for yourselves. It's really tragic.
13 year old girls write about how they are "ttc", or "trying to conceive".
if i were these kids, i'd just dance on prom night and enjoy.