Who's The Baby Daddy? (WTB)

Back when I worked in county welfare, about 15 years ago, I was a Medi-Cal and food stamps case worker for the state of California.

The part of my job which used to drive me crazy was working the Medi-Cal cases for expectant mothers. The state had passed a law in which no expectant mother would receive benefits without naming who the father of their little bundle of joy was. The reason being that the state would go after the father to recoup their losses after the baby was born. Imagine that, the state expected the fathers to contribute to their offspring!

Very few of the young ladies wanted to fess up as to who the father was, which I found irritating as hell. Many times I would take a break and see the father in a car parked behind the dumpsters, just out of sight of the office. These gals didn't want to rat out their boyfriends, but they had no trouble begging for public assistance.

The stories these ladies told as to how they got pregnant rank up there with the tallest tales in the land. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Here are a few of my favorites, which I have never forgotten, and which still either make me laugh or cry.

One day a gal came in about three months pregnant, and refused to name the father. I didn't pressure her, I just told her matter-of-factly that she had to name the father or her application would be denied. She lowered her eyes in shame and then whispered, "I didn't want to tell you guys because it's my sister's husband."

I raised my eyebrows ever so slightly. "Oh? How did it happen?" I mean, I knew the mechanics of the deed, but I was highly interested in the seedy circumstances.

She cleared her throat and told me this story in a half-whisper: She was living with her sister and brother-in-law in a studio apartment. Because there was no room for another bed, she had to sleep in the same bed as them. She claimed that, one night, the sister and bro-in-law were engaging in maritals, while she lay there sleeping and innocent. She said that some of her brother-in-law's sperm had accidentally splashed over onto her privates. Next thing she knew, she was pregnant.

It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. Those are some aggressive sperm, all right.

Here are a few more tall tales: One gal told me she was at a party, and noticed that her shoelaces were untied. She bent over to tie them, and some stranger came up from behind, and *POW* she was pregnant. She didn't know who it was because it "happened so fast I couldn't see his face". All I could blurt out was, "Oh, so it was a drive-by sperming?"

In a similar vein, another girl said she was visiting a frat house on the second floor. She bent out an open window to wave at some friends, and some frat guy came by and *BINGO* she was knocked up. She didn't see his face either.

There were countless girls who claimed they passed out at a party, only to wake up disheveled, sticky and pregnant. A few were embarrassed that they had to put three or FOUR names on the application, because it could have been any one of a number of guys. Then there was the one who claimed some guy had deposited their seed on her underwear, and when she put it on, she got pregnant....or the one who claimed a psycho armed with a super-soaker had loaded sperm along with water in it, and she was the victim of an water pistol attack which impregnated her.

There was a young girl whom I refused to work her application for an abortion because I knew her mother. The mother worked in our office and was always bragging that her little girl was brought up righteous, Catholic, and pure. She was an honor student and would NEVER think about having sex before marriage like so many of the scum this mother claimed to serve. Naturally, Mary Pure was knocked up by her boyfriend while they were working on an FFA project in a barn.

Then there was a 13 year old girl who's tears will haunt me the rest of my days. There she was, all of 13 years old, just a tiny little thing, about 8 months pregnant. She said that she had a big crush on a boy a few years older than her who lived on her street. She would do anything to be with him, so when he pressured her for sex, she let him. Unfortunately that incident led to her pregnancy. She sat in my office and cried bitter, frightened tears.

She said that, when she found out she was expecting, she told the boy, and he told her to get lost. He said it was her problem. He then found another girl to date, and this poor, waddling pregnant child followed them on a date to the beach. She confronted them on the pier and cried, "How could you do this to me? How could you use me and them dump me?"

He looked at her like something stuck on the bottom of his shoe and snarled, "I never loved you. I never cared about you one bit. You were following me around like a stupid lost puppy and I felt sorry for you. Now I hate you. Why don't you do the world a favor and go drown yourself?"

So there she was, sitting in my office crying a river of tears. Not only did her crush dump her in the most cruel way, but she was due to have a baby in a month and she knew she had ruined her life. She was scared and didn't know what to do. I prayed she would give the baby up for adoption and start her life anew, perhaps more bitter but wiser than before.

It was due to these experiences with these young women that I told my young daughters the following:

If you feel like you are old enough for sex, than you are old enough to be responsible about it. Condoms are a must, not just to prevent pregnancy, but STDs. If you find yourself knocked up, you have two options: An abortion, or having the baby. Either way, it is going to hurt. If you think that having a baby is like having a pet or a doll, think again. It's many years of hard work, responsibility, and money. If you think good old mom is going to take the baby off your hands, ain't gonna happen. I have raised my children and will not be raising any more. Think carefully the next time your young Romeo gets hot and heavy and pressures you to let him do something that could ruin your life. Not his, YOURS.

Teen pregnancy is something they never went through, because they knew the outcome.

If you are a pregnant teen or had your children as a teenager, more power to you. Just keep in mind that, 9 times of out 10, the taxpayer has to pick up the cost of you having a child before you are ready, financially or emotionally. Even if your parents help you, they still need public assistance for the child.

There are so many news stories about mothers who kill their child (or children). Too many Casey Anthonys out there, who love the attention of being pregnant but don't love the responsibility for the next 18 years. There are too many children who are unwanted, unloved, and living in psychic pain. There are too many mothers who require public welfare just to survive. If you were raped, I understand, but for every child born of rape, 10,000 are born out of carelessness.

Forgive my frustration, but as a taxpayer, I have just two words for you: STOP BREEDING. Thank you.

I like your writing style.

You are funny. ("Drive-by sperming" LOL)

And that was a good subject to rant about.

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I really like your post, this is great to bring awareness to these issues especially from a point of view that has experience with them.
The amount of girls and woman that go through these kind of things I can not imagine. I am sure you saw many going through it. I know I have been through it and it seems as if more and more people have experiences like this. It makes me feel like carelessness is a deep problem in our society and there is no easy fix for it.

The majority of female friends I know had their first child before they graduated high school and a lot of them did not even graduate. My own mother dropped out of high school when she had me too.
Most of those female friends were abandoned by the guys at the first sign of trouble. My own father did the same to my mother and I.
I have not met a couple who have actually sat down and planned to have a child.

I am glad you had that talk with your daughters. This kind of counseling is probably one of the best approaches.
It is something that my mother never talked with me about. I know plenty of other woman who never had that kind of talk with their mothers either and they are the friends I mentioned above who were teenaged mothers.

reply to post by BlueBanshee


Thanks, Blue. I saw enough pregnant teens to know that the whole abstinence approach is an abysmal failure. Telling teenagers, whose hormones are raging at an all time high, to "just say no", is incredibly ignorant, and actually harmful. I have always been really open with my girls when it came to subjects like sex and drugs. I would rather they come to me for advice than some other confused teen friend.

Most of my younger daughter's friends (she is now 19) have already had children or been pregnant. Guess who has the babies now? Yup, the grandparents. I only know of one who actually got her act together and is taking care of her baby, but that was after she was running wild while her mother had the infant, so her mom threatened to take the teen's parental rights away.

This girl wrote me and asked me what to do, after carrying on about how unfair her mother was to her. I told her that, in a nutshell, she gave up her right to be self-centered when she decided to have a baby at 17. I said that, if she didn't want to give that baby up for adoption, she had to start thinking about what was best for the little guy, because that is being a mother. If she wasn't able to think in those terms, I suggested she give the baby up.

She cleaned up her act and she and the little guy (now 3) are doing great. I can't say the same for my daughter's other friends and their babies. As for my daughter, she is supporting herself as a dental assistant, living in her own place, and doesn't want kids until she is in her mid twenties.

My older daughter doesn't want kids at all. She's a career girl. Maybe I did my job too well....?!

SnF. Another very wise entry. If you don't place in this contest, I entreat you to enter the next. You definitely have writing talent, and I appreciate your insights to life. Kudos to you.

I taught my daughter before her first menses about condoms. She got her first at age 11. She had sex at age 13, but remembered to have the boy put on a condom. The ex-wife was furious, because she did the "deed" in her house, but I was proud because she DID use a condom.

You can't tell kids what to do. You can only guide them. I explained how a female gets pregnant, drew a diagram, for her when she was 11, and now that she is informed, I trust that she will follow my advice. She still has the diagram, about the Knaus method, and to date, (knock on wood) she's not pregnant. I'd rather she knew about birth control, and use it, and have sex, than to not know anything, and have sex, and get pregnant. She's 15 now, and a bit wiser.