Completely agree. “Family values” types certainly believe that parents should always have a right to know that their daughter is pregnant, but the fact is that they don’t. And parents at large in our society have deprived themselves of that right by demonstrating again and again that they can’t handle it.

Which is why the parental notification laws are big among the “sluts should be punished” crowd. But for all practical purposes, given our society’s anti-woman assumptions, the only way to ensure the safety and well-being of young girls in this situation is to give them the option of secrecy.

Even though this is a consensual sex situation, this notion that a man who has been exposed to sexual temptation is a ravenous beast with no self-control feeds the narrative that when a rape occurs, it’s the victim’s fault for being tempting, because, you know, men can’t say no.

This is one of the biggest reasons why I have enthusiastically adopted feminist positions in the past several years. Misogyny clearly hurts women the most, but if you really think about it, it isn’t particularly flattering towards men, either. Misogyny tends to reduce men to mindless neanderthals who have no agency whatsoever over their own sexual behavior. It’s not so much that I was intentionally anti-feminist or misogynist when I was younger, but I never really gave much consideration to what a misogynist worldview actually requires one to believe, namely that male sexuality must be predatory in nature - that men are naturally predisposed to being rapists. A feminist worldview not only requires me to actively oppose institutions which treats women as lesser people, but it also requires me to acknowledge that men are fully capable of critical thinking and reasoning, and they do in fact have full agency of their own sexual behavior.

This male can only speak for himself, but I’m a lot more attracted to a worldview that actually considers me a fully rational being capable of making moral decisions than I am to a worldview that regards me as just a mindlessly aggressive ogre who can’t help the fact that he’s just a mindlessly aggressive ogre.

Amanda, I think you’re missing something—if this family has the sort of female sexual mores you say, what’s the chance that they understand how “incest” avoidance works?  What are the chances parents will freak out that she had sex with her (albeit genetically unrelated) brother? Pretty high, I’d say…

BTW, Dan Savage dealt with a similar issue (albeit a little ickier, involving a half-brother) in his column a couple weeks ago.

The rest of the Dear Abby column is worth checking out, too.  It also includes a letter from a man who is dating a sex worker, and finds that while he “has feelings” for the woman, he’s uncomfortable with her job.  Abby’s advice?  “What you should do is find a woman who isn’t a prostitute.” 

Because, you know, one woman is pretty much like the next, so he might as well just move on down the line to another one, right?  There’s no point whatsoever in him saying to her, “You know, I thought I was OK with the whole sex worker thing, but as our relationship gets closer, it bothers me” (which is pretty much what he says in his letter), and see what she thinks about the problem.  No, she has “already demonstrated that she isn’t going to change professions,” says Abby (although what he really says in his letter is, “She has talked about getting another job, but nothing ever happens).  It couldn’t possibly be that she does want to “change professions” but is running into difficulties that, who knows, her boyfriend might be able to offer some assistance with.  “Find another woman” is the only possible option in this case.

Not that I’m saying the couple in this scenario definitely *should* stay together.  The letter is too brief for me to get a clear sense of whether the man is or isn’t an asshole she’d be better off without, and it may well be that moving on is the best choice for both of them.  But I somehow have a feeling that if Abby heard from a man who had a problem with any other job his girlfriend might have, she would suggest some ideas for resolving the issue without breaking up, and would say something like, “If she can’t or doesn’t want to find another job, and you can’t adjust, you may not be compatible and should consider ending the relationship,” rather than, “Find another woman.” 

Ick, seriously, ick.

Main Gauche, can you clarify your comment? I can’t speak for Amanda but I have no idea what you’re saying.

Also, We don’t know anything about their situation, but I’m inclined to believe they were introduced to one another too late for the Westermarck effect to factor into this.

It seems fair to assume, absent evidence to the contrary, that the sex was consensual, but we can’t quite be sure. The step-brother’s age is the big question mark. Maybe he’s 20, or older, even. Maybe, though I doubt it, he’s 12.

Just throwing that out there.

That last sentence, “I really question the automatic assumption that parents are safe” hits home for me. As someone with an emotionally abusive mother, it hurts to have people assume that your mother is the one who fixes everything. To be fair to my mother, when I was sexually abused as a child, she WAS safe, and the right one to tell, and she did fix it. But other people’s mothers don’t. And mine would not be a safe person to go to in a time of emotional distress.

I see the assumption a lot in child service issues, and in caring for at-risk youth. I’ve heard stories of young people denied help until they reconcile with their (abusive) parents. I have to wonder why we as a society are so invested in the idea of parenthood as sacred that we are willing to put people at risk for it.

In a family that’s as screwed up as this one apparently is from the very short letter, I’m not betting that it’s even necessarily describing a consensual situation. (Pretty much by definition seducers are more experienced than the partners they seduce, and the chance of someone 16 having enough [almost certainly unprotected] sexual encounters to be a “seducer” but just by chance getting pregnant in a single encounter with her stepbrother just seems slim.)

At first I was miffed by the complete lack of mention of the possibility that terminating the pregnancy could be a really smart course of action, but if the writer is starting to show she’s well past the first trimester, and if she’s writing to Dear Abby for advice, that window of opportunity is probably gone. Even so, the advice seems just terribly, terribly pointless.

i think we need to know how old the stepbrother is

Previous Dear Abby columns by this author have showed support for choice, and came under fire because of it. 

http://www.lifenews.com/2003/11/25/nat-228/
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/71932/dear-abby-abortion/tim-graham

I wonder if she or her editor have moderated her writing in this instance to avoid this.

I read that same column on my lunch break and it bothered me too that the girl wrote that she “seduced” her stepbrother as if he had no responsibility in the matter.  It makes me wonder what kind of attitudes she has been exposed to that make her automatically feel the need to shoulder all the responsibility for the pregnancy

Oldfeminist, I followed the links you posted and it seemed like Abby did a good job of responding to the anti choice writers and sticking to her original advice, I love the answer she gave to the writer suggesting she recommend a CPC instead.

I love how the possibility of this girl getting an abortion doesn’t seem to be an option for Dear Abby.  She talks about prenatal care, but nothing about if the girl doesn’t want a baby.

Agree with paul ... and I’d add, consistent with what oldfeminist said, that parents rather than teens control Dear Abby’s syndication.  A handful of pissed-off readers complaining that Jeanne Phillips is against family values, or not sure that parents know best, and pow.  Less income for Jeanne Phillips.

I like your calling her on it, Amanda.  Let advice-mongers not be quite so 100% confident that “Tell your parents or another trusted adult” is always a safe thing to say.  Here it’s worse than inane.

Assuming the stepbrother isn’t 18 or older (and it doesn’t sound like he is), ideally the parents would eventually realize that these are a couple of kids who made a mistake, and deal with it in the most rational manner possible. I think a lot depends on what this girl means when she says her parents “will go crazy.” Is that go crazy as in become upset, as almost anyone world initially, or go crazy as in do something harmful?

In any case, it’s a real shame that this girl was in such dread that she’s made abortion a more difficult option.

The suggestion should have been to go to a clinic for advice and medical care, be it abortion or prenatal care. Now, I’d originally figured abortion wasn’t mentioned because she must be quite far along, but we can’t actually know that, really. And in this situation, going to the parents seems like a very bad idea, both because of the conservative view on gender-roles, and because there’s really is a likelihood that this will be seen as incest and the girl will get damaged even more by that

I hate the automatic change of emoticons to smilies here. they change the emotions I wish to convey

Your use of emoticons proves you are a twelve year-old girl Jadehawk and thus far to young to make decisions about personal expression and communication on the internet. Pandagon’s coding is a respected part of this community, selflessly providing the guiding parental hand you so obviously need. It has your best interests at heart and if you disagree with the choices it’s making for you it’s because you’re just not mature enough to understand that hypothetical people in hypothetical scenarios in Pandagon code’s mind have gone on to live happy fictional lives by following it’s advice to a T.

When I had an abortion at age 19, I did not tell either of my parents, and made significant efforts to hide it from my mother.  Not because she was physically abusive, though emotionally abusive is possible depending on your definitions, but because she had repeatedly proven herself to be just not helpful.  She was clearly going to make things more difficult, rather than easier.  My boyfriend, however, told his mother, as he needed to travel to be with me during the abortion, and she was, while disapproving of our contraception choices (we used a condom, which broke, followed by EC - I think she would have preferred an ongoing hormonal method, but those have bad mental health side effects for me), accommodating and practical.

Teens know where their parents fall on the spectrum of helpful to freak-out to abusive.  They’re not stupid and they’ve been in the family a long time. 

I agree PP or an adolescent walk-in-clinic (the abortion clinic sent me to one such place to date my pregnancy) would have been the best recommendation.

I really hate the argument for parental notification.  Yes, of course I want my daughter to come to me if she ever gets pregnant.  I hope by menarche we’ve established the kind of relationship where she knows I’ll help.  But if she can’t?  Then please SOMEONE help her!  And apparently forced childbirth is acceptable “punishment” for people with abusive parents?  Or something?

This young woman has made her decision on whether it is safe to tell her parents; she may be wrong, but she is in a better position to tell than any of us. Who are we to tell her that she’s made a poor decision when we have less information than she does ? Any advice that boils down to “tell your parents” is the typical patronising attitude of older people to the young (coming to you from a ‘grumpy old fart’).

I don’t disagree with Amanda’s “responsibility is 50/50 here”, but I read the young woman’s double admission of “fault” as bending over backwards to take some of the heat from the stepbrother. After all, the parents - if they have sufficiently medieval sexual attitudes - may well automatically blame the stepbrother and start shouting “rape” to the authorities.

Consensual stepsib sex is not uncommon, especially when the the partners become steps at an older age. And don’t think that I mean to minimize abusive step-sibling interaction by saying this. Abuse and rape happen too.

I think the girl is totally wrong to so wholly blame herself here, unless her stepbrother is 12 or 13 and extremely naive. The guy should have totally known that stebsib sex is bad mojo for the family and either declined to pursue the attraction further, stuck to non-procreative activities, or made sure as hell that his stepsister would not become pregnant.

This is about the least safe situation for both partners. Best option would have been to get an abortion early on. But if friends are commenting about the girls weight, it may be too late. If she does not live in a large city with access to abortion it may be impossible. Abby might know more about the situation than we do. Prenatal care and having the baby may be the only option.

However, I think the letter’s a troll. Probably written by a teenage guy attracted to his stepsister and is looking for both the titillation of seeing his fantasy in print and seeking a warning to keep this attraction to himself. Or maybe it’s a girl who is writing her first slash fic about her stepbrother.

Dear Abby is about 50/50—I think she generally understands that abortion happens, but I’m not entirely sure she doesn’t think it’s a Last Resort For The Sluttiest Of Sluts.

I really wish abortion wasn’t stigmatized. We would really be better off if people only had kids that they really wanted.

paul, giving her choices is another reason to go to a professional *first*.  A solid professional would immediately start the options counseling, which would include adoption, abortion, and keeping it.  She may still have time; a lot of states go up to 20 or 24 weeks, especially for minors in such obvious distress.

paul, giving her choices is another reason to go to a professional *first*

The fact that anti-choice twits don’t understand that giving people options and choices is the whole point of PP’s existence pisses me off. The responses to the Dear Abby column (via the NR link in comment 10) were infuriating. “OMG you told her to go to PP, you want her to get an abortion!” No, fuckface, PP is not an express abortion center, it’s a place that helps you plan your potential parenthood. It’s almost like it’s right there in the name.

Even in the sense that I want the stigma against abortion to end, which I very much do, I still think it’s incredibly important for the population at large to realize that PP doesn’t push abortions. But the anti-choice rank and file genuinely believes this bullshit. Is it any wonder that so many of them found the Abortionplex story believable?

@Triplanetary—they understand it.  They’re anti-choice.

Forgive the obvious-stating, but parental notification laws are basically a legislative gift to the worst parents.

If a girl is 16, that means her folks have had 16 freaking years to make it clear to her that she can come to them with her problems.

If the parents are so irresponsible that they couldn’t be bothered to do that (or if they have established that coming to them for help is, in fact, a bad idea, as is often the case for sexual matters), I see no reason why the rest of us are obliged to adjust our laws to extend to them a privilege that decent parents will have spent more than a decade working to earn.

“Even though this is a consensual sex situation, this notion that a man who has been exposed to sexual temptation is a ravenous beast with no self-control feeds the narrative that when a rape occurs, it’s the victim’s fault for being tempting, because, you know, men can’t say no.”

Um, who said there was a man involved?  For all we know, the stepbrother is 14 and/or has profound learning difficulties.  (Or the stepbrother could be highly intelligent and of the age where he should have known better and then some.  I don’t know.)

Also, there’s a whole legal concept called entrapment because humans in general have a widely shared weaknesses for both temptation and social pressure.  The Asch conformity experiments showed that most people can be socially pressured into giving a blatantly wrong answer to the simplest of questions.

But, yeah, guys (and gals) can and should be able to say no when appropriate. Humans aren’t very good at that and society isn’t that good at teaching teenagers how to do that (and simplistic “Say no to drugs.” campaigns are not sufficient).

In situations like this, it shouldn’t be blithely assumed that the girl will be safe telling her parents.  This “another adult” stuff is simply too vague.  I’d tell the girl first a) that she and her stepbrother share responsibility and b) that she really needs to think long and hard about how she believes her parents will react.  And that if that reaction is “violently” or in any way that makes her unsafe, she should hold off telling them and instead get herself some professional care.

See, this is a sticky situation.  Because I’m not naive enough to think all parents are saints who only want the best for their kids and would never act out violently, selfishly, or irrationally on hearing the news.  But, at the same time, parents tend to know more than their kids, in terms of life experiences.  And some kids want to avoid real abuse, while others really just want to avoid any kind of punishment.

Hiding from your parents isn’t healthy.  And maybe this girl’s parents are seriously messed up abusive.  Or maybe they’ll just take away her car, her cell phone, and her credit card.

I think getting some third-party professional counciling is the right move in the short run.  In the long run, though… unless her parents are real monsters, it would be really bad for her to try and keep a secret like that to herself.  Teen pregnancy is a trauma.  She’s going to need some serious support to get through her ordeal.  Traditionally, that kind of support comes from one’s family.  I’d hate to see her hide from her parents to avoid some temporarily privilege-loss and end up making some stupid choices - like having the baby and abandoning it in a dumpster or running away from home and living on the street - just because she couldn’t face the shame or the discomfort.

paul, giving her choices is another reason to go to a professional *first*

You’re absolutely right. I was focusing on the mostly-useless nature of the advice, rather than on alternatives.  It’s also kinda terrifying to think of the local options that might be open to a young pregnant woman who has come to the conclusion that the safest place she can turn to for help is a newspaper advice columnist.

In my experience, kids who make lousy decisions about sex are often not going to make great decisions about choosing parenthood either.

So I probalbly would have been more explicit than even Amanda. Something like (1) you have a right to get an abortion, (2) you may need to go before a judge to do it without telling your parents, (3) if you let it go too long, you may reach the point where abortion is no longer available, (4) look up your nearest planned parenthood, and (5) you also need to deal with the issues related to your relationship with your step-brother and with your parents, and you should talk to a doctor about this problem for that reason.

And I would spell out why she needs an abortion in some detail.

Is it possible she is using the term “fault” in a somewhat imprecise manner in order to make clear her position that she was not raped or coerced? In other words, she may only be trying to acknowledge her portion of responsibility in that the sexual encounter was something she sought and (presumably) enjoyed, and not intending to say the entire thing was her fault for being a wanton slut?  This seems to be a possibility. 

As many other have pointed out though, we need to know some things about the stepbrother to analyze this intelligently.

Writing to Dear Abby is about the least useful thing you can do in any urgent situation. Maybe a 16-year-old wouldn’t realize that, but by the time her letter runs it’ll be too late for her to care what Dear Abby had to say. I don’t know what motivates most people to write to advice columnists in the first place, but getting help in a time-sensitive situation shouldn’t be one of the reasons.

Several years ago, a family wrote to Dear Abby about their plans to basically pull a “girls who went away” on their pregnant 16-year-old daughter - extended trip to Europe, come back as if nothing happened - and it was clear from the letter that this was the parents’ decision and what the girl thought of that was not particularly relevant. I can’t remember what advise they were asking for, but Dear Abby answered their question without giving any indication that what they were planning might seriously fuck up their daughter in the longterm, psychologically and what-not.

I have to say that Dear Abby has really gone to the dogs since the mom died and the daughter took over. She is terrible.

Molly in nyc - I like the way you put it that parents work to earn the trust of their kids, rather than having a law hand undeserving parents the right on a platter.  I think my kids would tell me this, judging from other things they’ve told me, and I hope they would so I’d be able to help them.  But there are lots of kids who would be better off starting with Planned Parenthood and going from there.

Zifnab, when a teenager says, “my parents will go crazy,” and “I can tell you my mom will not be understanding,” I don’t think it’s responsible to ignore the possibility that the parents will respond abusively.

I can tell you from working at Planned Parenthood that “options counciling” is a strange beast and I am absolutely not surprised that most people who initiate contact with us by saying they want to “discuss options” end up choosing to have an abortion.

Here is my perspective: when someone tells me she is looking for “options” the first thing I do is ask a follow-up question to determine whether I will be handling this patient myself or whether I need to triage her to someone else (higher up the chain).  My usual line is “are you trying to determine your options as far as adoption, abortion and parenting?  Or have you already decided which one you want to do?”  The usual answer is “I meant that I want to know what my options are for getting an abortion” (finding a provider, cost, insurance coverage, procedures available based on gestational age).  I handle these people myself.  A person actually wanting do discuss adoption vs parenthood vs abortion would be handed up to a person with extensive training in being extremely neutral and avoiding entrapment, but this is honestly pretty rare.  Most of them just want to talk about abortion but are not comfortable just startingout by saying “I want an abortion.”

Lots of men find it objectionable that women can be sneaky about their reproductive lives.  They register emotions which range from infuriation to hurt when confronted with evidence that women sometimes get physical checkups or abortions on the sly; their heads explode when they hear about a case in which a woman who has been impregnated by one man turns around and marries another.  “Why didn’t she me?  Why didn’t she tell him?  Why didn’t she tell us?” are the questions which get asked.  Women are indicted with fraud and cheatery and with just being evil and with not playing fair, accusations which have some justice behind them but which fly wide of the mark, b/c while the behavior which inspires them is not great, the causes of it are not far to seek.

The causes are:

1)  Women are solely responsible for all matters reproductive.  When I say that women are solely responsible for reproductive matters I mean that women are responsible on an individual basis; they aren’t encouraged to huddle together and conspire; they aren’t expected to ask for help from each other or from anybody else.  Each is expected to fight her battle alone, since to expect anything else of her would be to tempt her to be careless of her duty.  Can’t women be responsible for their actions?  That’s the thinking.

2)  Women are collectively responsible for keeping the peace, especially for keeping the peace within a household.  Here is a cause in which women are allowed to band together, but this cause (in which women are allowed to band together) is a cause in which cover-ups abound, because they have to abound, otherwise the trick wouldn’t work.  The wrinkles and bumps of household life must be smoothed over and ironed out, in such a way that the fabric of familial existence appears never to have been strained, and that’s when the women of the family have been doing their work successfully so that the job is going right.  Rotten consequences ensue when the women of a family don’t succeed in their work and when the job goes wrong, consequences which are rotten not just for the women involved but for everybody, even on a societal level.  The pressure women feel to keep the peace is not just a personal pressure powered by personal fear.  It’s more global than that.  The pressure women feel to keep the peace is literally a social pressure and it’s fueled by the fact that when the social calm is shattered no-one thinks it’s because some man somewhere dropped the ball.  A mid-Victorian critic gave this sentiment its purest expression when he wrote that he was certain that there was not a social wrong done anywhere without a woman as its cause.  That’s a sentiment which survives, in a somewhat toned-down form, to this day.

So there you have it.  This is why women aren’t open and honest and why we often can’t afford to listen to advice which bids us not to be secretive.  As is often the case, I don’t have a solution to propose.  But, you have to know the reasons for a thing before you can come up with a solution for it, supposing a solution is what is desired.  These are observations I am offering to a person who is smarter than myself.

Lots of men find it objectionable that women can be sneaky about their reproductive lives.  They register emotions which range from infuriation to hurt when confronted with evidence that women sometimes get physical checkups or abortions on the sly; their heads explode when they hear about a case in which a woman who has been impregnated by one man turns around and marries another.  “Why didn’t she me?  Why didn’t she tell him?  Why didn’t she tell us?” are the questions which get asked.  Women are indicted with fraud and cheatery and with just being evil and with not playing fair, accusations which have some justice behind them but which fly wide of the mark, b/c while the behavior which inspires them is not great, the causes of it are not far to seek.

The causes are:

1)  Women are solely responsible for all matters reproductive.  When I say that women are solely responsible for reproductive matters I mean that women are responsible on an individual basis; they aren’t encouraged to huddle together and conspire; they aren’t expected to ask for help from each other or from anybody else.  Each is expected to fight her battle alone, since to expect anything else of her would be to tempt her to be careless of her duty.  Can’t women be responsible for their actions?  That’s the thinking.

2)  Women are collectively responsible for keeping the peace, especially for keeping the peace within a household.  Here is a cause in which women are allowed to band together, but this cause (in which women are allowed to band together) is a cause in which cover-ups abound, because they have to abound, otherwise the trick wouldn’t work.  The wrinkles and bumps of household life must be smoothed over and ironed out, in such a way that the fabric of familial existence appears never to have been strained, and that’s when the women of the family have been doing their work successfully so that the job is going right.  Rotten consequences ensue when the women of a family don’t succeed in their work and when the job goes wrong, consequences which are rotten not just for the women involved but for everybody, even on a societal level.  The pressure women feel to keep the peace is not just a personal pressure powered by personal fear.  It’s more global than that.  The pressure women feel to keep the peace is literally a social pressure and it’s fueled by the fact that when the social calm is shattered no-one thinks it’s because some man somewhere dropped the ball.  A mid-Victorian critic gave this sentiment its purest expression when he wrote that he was certain that there was not a social wrong done anywhere without a woman as its cause.  That’s a sentiment which survives, in a somewhat toned-down form, to this day.

So there you have it.  This is why women aren’t open and honest and why we often can’t afford to listen to advice which bids us not to be secretive.  As is often the case, I don’t have a solution to propose.  But, you have to know the reasons for a thing before you can come up with a solution for it, supposing a solution is what is desired.  These are observations I am offering to a person who is smarter than myself.

eeep.  (sorry about the double post)

Even though this is a consensual sex situation, this notion that a man who has been exposed to sexual temptation is a ravenous beast with no self-control feeds the narrative that when a rape occurs, it’s the victim’s fault for being tempting, because, you know, men can’t say no.

To the point that I wonder if the letter-writer wasn’t raped. An act of rape, anyway, even if it was within the letter of the law. She says she seduced him, but so would many people who’d been raped in certain circumstances.

My first thought when I read the letter here was “did she really seduce him, or did he rape her and she was told she seduced him?” If no one knows about the interactions then she wasn’t specifically told she seduced him but probably had an upbringing that could lead her to feel that way even if she’d been raped.

In reference to my earlier comment, I guess what I meant is, if her parents/family have the sort of views it sounds like they do (very chauvinistic), they probably are also more likely to not know about the Westermarck effect and react badly to the fact that she had sex with a nominal relative (ZOMG incest! pervert! etc)

Zifnab, when a teenager says, “my parents will go crazy,” and “I can tell you my mom will not be understanding,” I don’t think it’s responsible to ignore the possibility that the parents will respond abusively.

Children are clearly liars and incapable of making rational conclusions. Duh!

Slutty McSlutterson up there already totally screwed everything up and the only thing that will help fix it is clearly to submit entirely to their parents’ whim.

Yeah, I’d agree that Abby gives bad advice here.  It’s not that every kid afraid of telling their parents shouldn’t tell their parents (I could easily imagine that being the case here), it’s that you shouldn’t tell some anonymous kid that you don’t know very well that they absolutely have to tell their parents.  This is where I’d disagree with Amanda.  I think most kids ought to tell their parents in a situation like this, even given this kid’s brief description.  I think the best thing to do would have been to recommend that the kid strongly consider telling their parents but if they thought their parent’s response would be abusive or hurtful they should seek adult help at PP or whatever.  The one thing you can say for sure is that this girl needs to seek adult help quickly somewhere.  Either have the abortion or get started on prenatal care.  And if she isn’t willing to have an abortion, let’s hope her parents don’t make this more miserable than it needs to be.  It’s possible to imagine parents who would normally do an okay job raising their kid respond in a well meaning but unproductive way to this kind of situation.  Because, hey, it’s hard to know what to do if you find out that your step kids are fucking without using contraceptives.  It’s a, “oh shit, what did I do wrong here and how can I fix it?” kind of situation.

At the same time, yeah, obviously parental notification laws are absurd.  It is absolutely most likely to hurt kids whose parents don’t deserve the discretion in authority we normally grant parents.

I think getting some third-party professional counciling is the right move in the short run.

Right on.  A third party counsellor can be neutral, and everything the teen client tells the counselor is privileged. 

In the long run, though… unless her parents are real monsters, it would be really bad for her to try and keep a secret like that to herself.

Bad how?

Teen pregnancy is a trauma.

Any pregnancy is a trauma.  Physical, emotional and psychological changes happen in the body which are disruptive and can sometimes be confusing, distressing, and physically damaging and/or innately harmful.  Pregnancy is no walk in the park.  It is not the default state of human females.  With every pregnancy comes the likelihood of risk to the pregnant woman’s health and life.  The casual dismissal of pregnancy as a regular occurence and not a health condition needs to stop if we are to develop fair policies concerning the equitable treatment of pregnant women in society.

She’s going to need some serious support to get through her ordeal.  Traditionally, that kind of support comes from one’s family.  I’d hate to see her hide from her parents to avoid some temporarily privilege-loss and end up making some stupid choices - like having the baby and abandoning it in a dumpster or running away from home and living on the street - just because she couldn’t face the shame or the discomfort.

I agree that support is warranted, but if I had known when I was 16 what I know now, namely, that once a person is pregnant, minor or not, she is entitled to certain support from government programs, I would have used that information as a cudgel against my family members to do whatever I damned well pleased at the time. 

The truth of the matter is that pregnant teenagers qualify for very many benefits, such as Section 8 housing, WIC, and Medicaid, (housing, food and healthcare) which non-pregnant teenagers must rely on their parents to deliver.  If their parents are abusive, negligent, or simply non-attentive and self-involved, those teenagers must figure out other ways to get their needs met.  Teen pregnancy is often viewed as a cure-all for teenagers with abusive or non-attentive parents, especially among low-income teens living in economically underdeveloped areas.  This is how we develop entire neighborhoods living in a cycle of poverty, where each successive generation knows that there will be public assistance and they also know just how to access it. 

Let’s not pretend that teen pregnancy isn’t a huge access point.

Zifnab, when a teenager says, “my parents will go crazy,” and “I can tell you my mom will not be understanding,” I don’t think it’s responsible to ignore the possibility that the parents will respond abusively.

There’s “crazy” as in “my mom will yell at me and ground me for a month”.  There’s “crazy” as in “my mom will break down into tears and scream at me at kick me out of the house until she’s put herself back together”.  And then there’s “crazy” as in “my mom will completely lose her shit and start hitting me with a rolling pin”.

None of these are particularly appealing for the child, and I doubt doubt this girl will happily avoid any repercussions if she can.

That said, if the parent is a sane, healthy, and grown-up individual capable of offering wisdom and support in her daughter’s hour of need, telling the girl to go and do everything behind her mom’s back is terribly bad advice.  You’re acting on the assumption that the girl has a bad parent.  If you’re wrong - if the girl has good parents - and she flees from them, she’s doing herself a serious disservice.

Let’s assume she does run straight to Planned Parenthood.  And let’s assume she’s intercepted by some of those Teen Crisis Pregnancy jerks.  Now you’ve advised a girl to go out on her own, behind her parents’ backs, and dumped her right into the waiting arms of people you and I would both recognize as raving psychotics.  Congratulations, now she’s pregnant and in a cult.

There’s a possibility that her parents will be abusive if she confronts them.  But there’s an equal - if not greater - possibility that random third party Jesus hobos will be just as abusive if she gets caught up in them while she’s trying to work behind her parents’ backs.

Again, I’d council her to get in touch with a third-party mediator before she confronted her parents.  But I wouldn’t council her to hide her condition indefinitely.  That’s a dark road.

Children are clearly liars and incapable of making rational conclusions. Duh!
Slutty McSlutterson up there already totally screwed everything up and the only thing that will help fix it is clearly to submit entirely to their parents’ whim.

Way to beat the ever-living shit out of that strawman.

Not speaking to this specific case, where we simply don’t have the information to judge, and so have to believe the LW, there are many reasons other than abuse that a teenager wouldn’t want to tell their parents. If I had gotten pregnant in high school, I would have been seriously inclined to just deal with it on my own, not because my parents were abusive or controlling, but because I’d feel like I disappointed them and would just rather not have the difficult conversations. At 16, I wouldn’t have seen that my parents would have wanted to be there for me, the way that now, as a parent, I can see that I would want to be there for my kid.

“Teen pregnancy is often viewed as a cure-all for teenagers with abusive or non-attentive parents, especially among low-income teens living in economically underdeveloped areas.  This is how we develop entire neighborhoods living in a cycle of poverty, where each successive generation knows that there will be public assistance and they also know just how to access it.”

Yes, but if the girl who wrote this letter (supposing the whole thing not to be a hoax) knew about all this free stuff and knew where and how to get it, would she be pleading for counsel from Dear Abby?  Really?

Besides, I get the feeling that this kid is a middle-class girl.  Don’t you?

I do. 

However, just because she’s middle-class doesn’t mean she can’t get those benefits.  She’s likely never been told.  That’s why she needs to talk with a counselor first, not her parents. A social worker or counseling associate can give her referrals to resources that her parents simply cannot match. 

No matter how “middle-class” her family is, they don’t have the resources of a government agency.
That’s the point I was trying to make.

Way to beat the ever-living shit out of that strawman.

If you’re going to do something, go all the way with it.

If her parents are middle class, they can probably do better than match bare subsistence for groceries and means-adjusted rent in the slums.

I don’t understand why people have this magical belief about parents in this situation. First of all, whenever a teenager says “I’m afraid to tell my parents”, I assume that the teenager knows better than I do how her parents would react if they were told.

Second, parents have ideologies and prejudices and tempers and human faults, and telling her parents actually often decreases the likelihood that she will be able to make the right choice in the situation. Right now, she’s 16 and pregnant. That’s the most important, most salient fact in this situation. Yes, there are all sorts of issues with respect to the stepbrother and what the circumstances of the sex were and how the family will live in the future and everything else, but what is towering over anything is that if this girl doesn’t get herself an abortion, she’s going to turn what may have been a questionable decision or an ugly incident into a couple of decades or more of living hell.

Third, I suspect that the kinds of parents who actually should get told about these situations (a) tend to raise children who are less likely to get into them, because they receive open-minded, good information about sex, and (b) tend to get told anyway when the daughter does find herself in these situations.

Really, even with the incomplete information we have here, we have a 16 year old girl who says she seduced her stepbrother, and engaged in at least one sex act (bear in mind, while lots of pregnant teens claim it’s a single sex act, the odds are not that high of a pregnancy based on a single sex act; most of the time there’s at least several instances of intercourse) while presumably not using protection or birth control. Unless this was actually a rape by the stepbrother, which is definitely one possibility, but only one, the likelihood of this scenario occurring with 16 year old girl who has the type of parents whom she could actually talk to about this situation is pretty low. More likely, if this was consensual, this is the sort of thing that happens where the parents are out to lunch in terms of educating their children about sex.

So, really, I feel strongly that the correct advice is almost surely “don’t talk to your parents”. Indeed, the correct advice is rarely going to be that.

The correct advice is “get an abortion and get it as quickly as possible”. That solves the most pressing problem here.

@ 51 Nimravid

Of course they can, but many middle-class parents deliberately and intentionally withhold their support from their pregnant teenaged daughters by kicking them out of the house (or threatening to).  Conversely, you rarely hear of that happening with teenaged boys who get their teenaged girlfriends pregnant.

Public support for pregnant women of all ages gives young women a way to fight back against parental authority, which, as we all know, is not always even-handed, fair, and tempered with the respect concerning her health status that a mother-to-be deserves.  The government’s role provides at least some leverage against parents who might seek to abuse their authority by making such threats to cut off support to their pregnant daughters. 

Oh, and by the way, in some states, it is a crime to kick your minor child out of the house and refuse to support them.  If the state gets involved, they can make the minor a ward, house them in a children’s home, and then charge the parents with criminal neglect for refusing to care for their own children.  I’d like to see that done more, to remove the threat of eviction as punishment for being pregnant while a minor.

@Rachel Tyrel- OK, I guess I just wasn’t getting you about why her presumably middle class parents couldn’t match the resources of the not-quite-luxurious public assistance that’s available.

That said, if the parent is a sane, healthy, and grown-up individual capable of offering wisdom and support in her daughter’s hour of need, telling the girl to go and do everything behind her mom’s back is terribly bad advice.

But the advice in this post was to go to an individual capable of offering wisdom and support (actually, an organization of them) who particularly deal with pregnancy and from there, have help deciding whether telling her parents was the right thing to do or whether she should do something else.  If the parent(s) were capable of offering support, she probably wouldn’t have been writing Dear Abby, blaming herself for seducing her stepbrother as if he wasn’t involved, hiding her pregnancy for months, and saying that her parents were going to react badly.  None of the evidence points even slightly toward it being a good idea to tell her parents, but that wasn’t ruled out.

None of the evidence points even slightly toward it being a good idea to tell her parents, but that wasn’t ruled out.

Right.  Exactly this.  Amanda’s post specifically stated that one of the benefits of going to an professional adult first is that they are the most likely to be trained to ask the right questions in order to help the letter writer to decide/verbalize what kind of parental freak-out she is actually worried about.

Way to beat the ever-living shit out of that strawman.

Pot, meet kettle.  Or, rather - pot, meet something that is not black.

Seriously, Zinfab, what the hell are you objecting to in the first place?  Why do you seem to be laboring under the impression that the rest of us think that not telling her parents is a fine and dandy option just because?  Or are you just offended that we trust a teenage girl’s assessment of her situation?  Because nothing you originally said actually goes against the post, it just happens to be full of all kids off “buts!” and lots of talk about it being a bad thing if she doesn’t tell her parents if it’s safe to do so.  Which is not something anyone has has suggested she do.  (Although I do suspect some of us have very different definitions of “safe” than you do.)

Most parents would be terribly hurt if their teenage daughter had an abortion without telling them. The smart ones avoid this situation by not being assholes to their kids.

The correct advice is “get an abortion and get it as quickly as possible”. That solves the most pressing problem here.
Comment #52: Dilan Esper on 08/12 at 06:25 PM

The correct advice is to find out what the girl really wants to do.  I really don’t want anyone deciding for other people what they should do about a pregnancy.  This is not choice.

there’s really is a likelihood that this will be seen as incest and the girl will get damaged even more by that
Comment #16: jadehawk on 08/12 at 12:18 AM

Lots of step siblings *have* grown up together.  It’s not at all impossible that this really is incest, not in the genetic sense, but in the psychological sense. 

I’m a little concerned that it appears multiple posters are eagerly jumping in to brush that possibility away, as if the worst thing that could happen is that the parents might be improperly unsupportive of these sweet little star-crossed lovers.  I do understand that what is legally incest isn’t always really improper, but if that’s the first thing you think when an underage girl has been convinced she was the “seducer” you’re seriously not up on the excuses older men use on younger women and girls to keep them quiet and feeling guilty rather than assaulted.

Hiding from your parents isn’t healthy.  And maybe this girl’s parents are seriously messed up abusive.  Or maybe they’ll just take away her car, her cell phone, and her credit card.

Zifnab, you are a fucking idiot with zero ability to put yourself in the shoes of people unlike you. That would be, women, and anyone who’s had to deal with the level of family dysfunction that would necessitate keeping such a secret from one’s parents. Why don’t you scroll up and read the comment by “Dr. Confused,” whose user handle might imply that she’s got a hell of a lot more education than you do, and learn a few things.

Bekabot: “Lots of men find it objectionable that women can be sneaky about their reproductive lives.” Yep. Like Zifnab. And if she’s just a silly hysterical teenage girly-girl who’s worried about getting grounded, then he finds that even more objectionable.

And, yeah, Dear Abby and just about every other mainstream advice columnist out there these days gives horrible advice. It’s a combination of having gotten the job through family (Dear Abby) or buddies (Cary Tennis), and a corporatist media that strives to balance not offending Ma and Pa Teacracker with getting as many outraged page hits and trackbacks as possible.

It is telling to me that my parents’ tooth-and-nail opposition to parental notification laws relaxed as they themselves became less insane (due to a number of factors).  Because, of course, as they achieved a vague level of sanity, it became more and more obvious that their kids would come to them for help.