Last Saturday at my son’s soccer game, a young high school girl informed her friend that she could not greet her with a hug because she was feeding. Soon it was revealed that the baby she was feeding was one of those pretend babies every school has decided is a grand weapon in the anti-pregnancy war. After feeding, burping, and rocking the baby, it continued to scream out. The high schooler said, “I never want to have a baby.â€
I suppose the proponents of this program would rejoice at such a statement. After all, the point as I have had it explained to me is to teach those girls how disruptive a baby would be to their lives. They want to remind the girls that a baby means restless nights and missing key social activities with friends.
But you know what those babies don’t do? They do not coo or learn to roll over. They do not open their eyes in way that melts the heart. They do not have little fingers which grasp at their parent’s fingers. They do not smile. They do not grow up into wonderful people.
Basically, they do nothing good or pleasant. Only the bad of babies comes programmed in their electronic DNA. So what do girls learn? Babies are bad. They ruin your life. I never want to want to have a baby. And such thoughts only add to the refrain of our culture that children are an expensive inconvenience. Right now, the baby would ruin their social lives. Later it will ruin their careers. All throughout, it will ruin their chase after the Jones next door.
Why not teach them the truth, that babies are meant to be had in marriage where sexuality itself belongs? Why not let them handle real infants so they learn that babies do require lots of care but are truly blessings beyond comparison?
Who really thinks that when a young girl is alone with her boyfriend and his pressure and her passions unite, she is really going to be influenced into saying no by a fake baby doll she had for a weekend?
No, only true moral formation (by Word and Sacrament) and appropriate parental boundaries can work towards this goal. Even then of course, there will be times when temptation will give way to sin and will bring need of repentance and additional care.
These babies, while accomplishing nothing, simply teach our girls that babies are bad. And they do not need another verse to that song.
Psalm 127:3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.
I’m going on a tangent here, but …
The other day I joked, after speaking at the local Lutheran High, that someone there seemed to be espousing a strange (but likely effective) form of birth control linked (oddly enough) to the uniforms. The boys all looked handsome and preppy in their khakis and polo shirts. The girls, on the other hand, had apparently been told that they would have to spend four years wearing potato sacks in public. Even as a hormone-filled teenage boy I wouldn’t have gotten near enough to any of them to touch one with a ten-foot pole. Logical: no attraction, no dating; no dating, no hanky-panky; no hanky-panky, no teen pregnancy. Thank you very much, ugly plaid jumpers.
Of course, that’s a joke (and not a very good one). But the uniform idea itself troubled me in a line of thinking parallel to yours, Phil. These girls uniforms were truly horrendous. Mostly because they negated the beauty and spark of these precious gifts of God. But they also (and much more importantly) robbed these young people of the opportunity to make wise choices, to explore their own creativity and personality through fashion, and to learn to work within gentle, guiding boundaries (a well-written and enforceable dress-code) to express themselves. All of these would teach them more than the current, draconian codes could ever teach (besides outright rebellion and an aversion to pleated skirts).
As it stands our High Schools are teaching our young women to hate babies … and PLAID!
It comes back, as you said, to the hard and constant work of communicating the real message: our genetic drive toward rebellion, the clarion call of our God, the love and acceptance of Christ, the ever-present transforming effort of the Spirit.
It’s not as easy as programing a robot-baby or buying an ugly outfit. But the lasting benefits? Well, they’re downright eternal!
Peace,
Pete