Pregnant... no, not me

I have this thing for watching 16 And Pregnant. It's an MTV show for teenagers, real life teen girls dealing with their pregnancies. I can't exactly relate to it, having A. never been a teen mom, B. Not a teenager anymore, and C. Being a virgin through nearly all of high school.

It's just never something that came up. But I find it fascinating. The girls are either very mature and ready to do their best, or they're ridiculously naive, several fries short of a happy meal. The one thing they all have in common is that they didn't use condoms or the pill to prevent pregnancy.

Sweet mother of holy crap. I don't get it. I went to a Catholic school that refused to talk about birth control methods and my mom didn't sit me down for a sex talk, yet I knew the deal. Have sex = get pregnant. Have sex + condom and/or birth control pill = Tiny chance of pregnancy.

And it's not like these girls didn't know either. They didn't hear about contraceptives afterwards like, "What? Connn...doms? Pills? You mean there's pills to stop this from happening? And I can just buy condoms in the store? WHAT? They're FREE in various health clinics? Fuck!"

No, they knew. They just for some reason figured that they could have unprotected sex and still manage not to conceive. I don't know how. Perhaps they fancy themselves Jedi. "Sperm, you will not travel to the fallopian tubes..."

Crazy. I knew of a few teen moms in high school. Never inquired about how it happened. I always gave the benefit of the doubt that their methods failed, the condoms broke, regular human error. I thought that in this day and age it's not likely anyone would risk unprotected sex when so many options are available and the stakes are so high. Wrong!

I'll go on watching it. It's become a guilty pleasure. I'm too old to be warned about the perils of teen pregnancy, but that just means the seat on my high horse is especially cushy.