In teenage pregnancy, the boys are equally at fault

After publication of a recent column that mentioned Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s unwed 17-year-old pregnant daughter, I heard from several people upset that I would dare mention the child or the family’s "private matter."

There were those people, however, angry not because I brought up the subject of teenage pregnancy, but because I never mentioned the boy who had fathered the child.

"Nobody ever talks about the boys," one reader wrote. "Girls don’t get pregnant all by themselves."

Let me say up front that I don’t cut males any slack for their role in producing the hundreds of thousands of babies born to teenage girls in this country every year.

For years I have been one who talks to (and about) young boys and men who don’t take responsibility for their actions, including engaging in out-of-wedlock and unprotected sex.

For several years I made annual appearances at one Dallas high school, which had a very high teen-pregnancy rate, to hold an assembly with boys only. With the principal observing, we had frank — sometimes heated — discussions about sexual activity, respect for females and themselves, and about simply being accountable for their own deeds.

I’ll never forget that during one of those sessions, an arrogant young man stood up, proudly announced that he had fathered a child, and basically dared me to say anything about it.

"I have just one question for you," I told him. "Since you are a father, are you taking care of your baby?"

"My mother sends her money every week," he proclaimed.

"Your mother is sending money?" I asked. "Your mother, who I am sure is working hard to take care of you, now has to take care of your child?"

"Yeah," he said, to the jeers of his fellow classmates.

"Let me just suggest that you indeed sired a child. But you are no father."

Most of the other boys applauded.

After the assembly, that student and two other young dads came to me and talked privately about responsibility and the peer pressures they had in their macho world in which it was considered admirable to get a girl pregnant but not so cool to be seen taking care of a baby.

Then there was a time when I made regular visits to the school for pregnant girls in Fort Worth. On one of my visits, I arrived just as staff members were breaking up a fight between two girls that took place right in front of the principal’s office.

When I learned what the girls had been fighting about, I begged the principal to let them come to the assembly. In referencing the fight, which all the students were aware of, I told them why the girls had been battling: They were both pregnant by the same 22-year-old man.

I told the group, "Instead of them fighting each other, they should have been teaming up to go after his sorry behind."

The girls in the room cheered.

A couple of weeks later, in preparing a story on teenage pregnancy for public television, I got a chance to meet the young man at the home of one of the girls — the one he said he truly loved and planned to marry after she graduated from school.

He had been in the military, he said, and he had not planned to get anyone pregnant, much less two girls.

"It was something that just happened," he said.

When I told him I had called him "sorry" in front of a bunch of girls, he said that he could understand why some people might feel that way but that he hoped one day to prove me wrong.

There is nothing more sobering than standing in a room looking out at the faces and the bellies of 300 or so pregnant teenagers.

You can’t do that without feeling for each of them, and without thinking about the lack of responsibility of males.

We have got to talk to our children about sex. And, yes, we need sex education in our schools, starting in elementary. School officials once told me of an 11-year-old student who was pregnant.

Parenting, of course, is important, but good parenting is no guarantee that kids won’t get in trouble.

Children of some of the best parents in the world still make grave mistakes that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

As the father of a son, and a man who has scores of nephews, I know that boys and young men look for guidance on tough, sometimes personal issues even when they act like they don’t want or appreciate it.

One of the best ways we can educate them is through example.

Boys need positive male role models in their lives, and it’s incumbent on us to be there for them — not just for our own, but also for those who happen to be somebody else’s children.