FoxNews linked to this story from the Denver Post about high school girls lobbying to have a four week maternity leave. The article discusses the issue in public high schools, but it's obviously an issue for every educational institution.
Personally, I've never really been comfortable with the old Catholic high school tradition of expelling pregnant girls. I don't know how many schools actually do this nowadays, but I remember hearing horror stories (and it's worth noting the second-hand nature of such accounts). If there is anything an unwed mother really needs, it's a good education.
I think our education system does need to take a serious look at how it operates if it is going to provide a more pregnancy-friendly environment, and I would conjecture the difficulty in managing an education and a pregnancy is probably one of the leading causes of abortion in the younger demographic.
I'm not really sure that four week's maternity leave is the answer, though.
What I find particularly problematic about the article is that it keeps talking about how pregnancy becomes "a barrier to graduation" and how "A third of teen moms receive their high-school diplomas and 1.5 percent get college degrees before they turn 30."
The issue isn't merely the pregnancy. It's a matter of pregnancy combined with a diploma-centered mentality of the education system. Wouldn't the reason why pregnancy would
prevent a diploma be due to the fact that the pregnancy kept the woman
from doing the work needed to earn the diploma? But the difficulty which child-rearing poses to acquiring knowledge and skills seems to receive less attention in the article, although there is mention of remote learning programs.
I think the real solution would be to develop something beyond jury-rigged programs that address the needs of pregnant women, if only because they would create an unfair playing field for men and women who choose to wait to get pregnant.
We simply haven't designed our work patterns to take pregnancy into account, and it seems to me that it's going to take a much larger overhaul to fix the problem.
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