A writer’s mind must always be looking for the truth behind the outlandish. I have no idea what snippet or previous of what cop/detective show the title came from. I just know it was years ago and it had the kind of shock factor required to take root in the back of my mind. Two women in suits or something like that were getting into a heated discussion in an office. I believe one of the women was supposed to be a detective and she was roundly chastising the female principal/super intendant of a school for forcing a pregnant girl to attend school from home.
The female cop was going into all kinds of anger using every cliche’ from the headlines about stigmatizing/ostracizing/belittling girls who got pregnant. And finally when she was running out of wind she spat “and what gives you the write to do that?”
Our school official snapped back “because pregnancy is contagious.”
“Oh come on! You’re a woman! Don’t tell me you don’t know how it works!” shouted the female cop.
In a measured, yet angered tone the school official responded “within these walls pregnancy is contagious. I let suzy (don’t remember name) come in here pregnant and all her girlfriends start thinking all of the attention she is getting is neat. So do other girls who don’t even know her. Later she starts bringing her baby around and all of the girls think it is beautiful and start wanting one of their own. Next thing you know I don’t have one pregnant teenager, I have 40. You know how I know that? Because we used to do _exactly_ what you want and that’s how it always turned out!”
I am of course paraphrasing that because it was 15-20 years ago when I saw that show. It was back when there was this national brew-ha-ha going on in the media about how the public school system treated pregnant teenagers/new moms, basically locking them out of the building in inner city schools. The media back then was always catering to the most liberal bleeding heart, tossing journalism to the wind when it came to explaining the logic behind any decision the most liberal bleeding heart was against. That snippet of that cop show dared to show the other side.
Make no mistake, there is almost always a method to the madness. You need to fully understand that method before going orbital about the madness. Too few humans do this today and most writers don’t. Most of today’s writers are given a point of view to put into the article when they write for what can laughingly be called newspapers in this country. We won’t even bother discussing magazines and “journalists” on television.
Birth Control Pills
Around this same time a middle school in Maine started offering birth control pills to students. I don’t remember if that was the first school, but I do remember the first school to do this, but I do remember the first to make news headlines all the way back to Illinois was somewhere in the north east. I do remember that was the beginning of the national outrage and buzz cycle. Eventually someone got the principal or a school board member to explain it, though most news channels didn’t bother to air that report. It was some massively unbelievable number the school district had spent on services required to provide an education to first pregnant girls, then the school age single mothers they became. I mean something like north of a million dollars over the previous 4 years and they didn’t have a high pregnancy rate. But the tutors, transportation, daycare, nutrition, medical, etc. they incurred on a per student basis when a pregnancy happened was just astounding.
It was a spreadsheet decision. If each and every girl in the school requested birth control pills, the cost of the tests required before they could be issued and the pills themselves would cost $120,000 for any given school year. They were pretty certain not every girl would ask. The follow up reports were few and far between. People preferred being angry over this decision to vetting its results. Oddly enough, these same people bitch profusely about their taxes which go to fund the school so what they are really bitching about is the school board saving them a lot of money. I seem to recall one follow up report some 3 years later which owned up to the fact only one girl had gotten pregnant since the policy had been instituted.
Because pregnancy is contagious.
Just because something isn’t biologically true doesn’t mean it is false.
Your job as a writer is to find the truth behind everything, not just what you agree with.
