A dollar a day keeps the babies away!

Or so says a group in North Carolina.

That's the incentive behind College Bound Sisters, a program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro that aims to keep 12- to 18-year-old girls in school and baby-free. Girls in the program attend 90-minute meetings every week at which they receive lessons in abstinence and the use of contraceptives — and they receive $7 every week they do not get pregnant. The money is deposited into a fund that's collectible when they enroll in college.

Link to original article.

Seriously. Gotta bribe kids to abstain now huh?...Wait, it's not that they
require abstinence to be in the program, just dont get pregnant!

"We talk about abstinence, but it's not a requirement," Brown told FOXNews.com. "We teach decision-making, being responsible and avoiding pregnancy. The meetings are very interactive."

I dunno about this. Is it a good idea or not. It seems counter productive to me. Your thoughts?

I'm curious to find out how many of these kids will be going to extreme measures to hide and/or end their pregnancies for a buck.

I expect to be more than a little disgusted.

I dont know if im just getting old, but it seems like well over half the ladies I went to school with in the late 90's are now pregnant, or parents. I would love to see the statisics of people who were at one time enrolled, but had to drop out because they became pregnant. I can think of three people who I personally know who had to do just that.

But being a North Carolinian, this story doesn't surprise me in any way.

Originally posted by thisguyrighthere
I'm curious to find out how many of these kids will be going to extreme measures to hide and/or end their pregnancies for a buck.

I expect to be more than a little disgusted.

Didn't even think of that. It'd be a bit shocking to see someone actually go that far...shocking but not surprising.

But still, paying them? Giving them college trust funds or whatever to not get pregnant? Just seems like a waste of time and money to me.

It is certainly a good thing that this is a family friendly site otherwise a very flippant remark from me might involve something about how many young women make college tuition by means far and removed from abstinence and make far, far more than $7/wk while doing so.

Then again, $7/wk would pay for birth control pills from Planned Parenthood as well.

But I suppose if I lived outside of reality and jammed my thumb really far up my butt too, I could come up with some pretty goofy ideas as well.

But hey, my philosophy would be to give these girls more opportunities to obtain and maintain self-esteem and they would be less likely to succumb to peer-pressures to have sex in the first place. Mind you that personal growth and development is not 100% either, but it definitely better than bribe, especially as a paltry one as this is.

Wow, I'm shocked. That's actually my college. I've never heard anything about this before though. It sounds like an interesting idea.

It's a bit unfair. I wish I could get $7 a week for abstaining and not getting a girl pregnant from 12-18. I would have $2160 for college now.

reply to post by Epic Wolf


Star for you. You took the words right out of my mouth. But then again, they can say its obvious when a female gets pregnant, not so to determine if a guy is running around knocking someone up.

[edit on 25-6-2009 by Juston]

Wow.

I could have made SO much money by this time.

But seriously, that is a little sick. Atleast they are teaching contraceptive use, rather than abstinence only. That way, these girls atleast know they can have sex and know they know how to do it safely, not just safe from pregnancy, but STD's as well. Too many students get taught abstinence only, and get themselves into a mess of trouble when they do have sex.

I'm curious to find out how many of these kids will be going to extreme measures to hide and/or end their pregnancies for a buck. I expect to be more than a little disgusted.

Exactly, How many babies will be killed for seven bucks?

Though I cannot say I agree with this, I do wonder how it works out in the end if the program does happen to be succesful in keeping at least a few young women from getting pregnant.

I know quite a few girls who got pregnant while we were in high school.. a couple in middle school. Now keeping in mind I came from a very poor area, pretty much all of these women either dropped out of high school to take care of their kids, or skipped out on college plans because of them.

Now, it's not cheap to have a baby, or to take care of one. Most of these young girls end up on governement health care to pay for the doctor visits, the hospital bill from the birth. Then after that they get WIC, food stamps, welfare checks (that I have seen quite a few cash only to use for selfish purposes)

So I would guess for each student this program keeps from getting knocked up, they save a lot more government money than they spend paying these kids a buck a day. Maybe they are expecting it to keep many students from teen pregnancy?

Just a thought..

[edit on 25-6-2009 by Seyana]

Teenage pregnancy isn't something that has gotten any worse over the years. The only difference is now it is out in the open.

During WWII and before, it was commonplace for teenage shotgun weddings and teenage pregnancy (often having many kids before their teenage years were over). In the 1950s and early 1960s, when teenage pregnancy was no longer socially acceptable, pregnant teens were institutionalized and their babies put up for adoption. In the three decades after that, we shuffled off pregnant teens to special schools to hide them from the rest of the school populace as if we were still ashamed of them.

The only thing that has changed in regards to the number of teenage pregnancies is that it no longer carries the same social stigma that it has for the past 60 years.

The idea of paying teens to abstain won't keep them from abstaining, but it may make them more conscientious about using Birth Control to prevent pregnancy. That's not entirely a bad thing.

And, a similar program where schools paid a monetary award to students for good grades immediately increased grades schoolwide by 40%! So, there is a precedent to show that this isn't an entirely unwarranted method to modify teenage behavior.

Personally, I would rather give a teen $1 a day for contraceptives, but as that is too controversial of a subject, I'll leave it up to the teens to provide their own means with the money they get for supposedly "abstaining". I am wise enough to know that human nature doesn't change and that teens are going to be doing the nasty just as early and just as often as we did, and our parents did, and our parent's parents did.