It's Monday so let's start the week out with a little healthy debate. As I trolled the web this morning I came across this little tid bit:
Becoming a mother a dilemma and victory
The article details the decision of a young woman who was a awarded a track scholarship at the University of Memphis and became pregnant to keep her baby. The decision meant she lost her scholarship.
There are a lot of people up in arms about this one. They are calling it many things: illegal, immoral and just plain wrong. I'm going to hop over to the other side of the fence though. Let's look at it from the another standpoint.
This isn't a fourteen year old girl we're talking about. This young woman is a sophomore in college. That makes her 21 at least, so I'm guessing both she and her boyfriend are conversant in the current methods of birth control and the fact that using only one method can sometimes be risky...you can double up, say a condom and the pill. There's also the fact that when she was awarded the scholarship not only was she aware that the standard good grade guideline applied, she was told and had to sign an acknowledgement that if she fought, got into verbal conflicts with the coaches or became pregnant she would lose her scholarship. It's something all the students awarded the scholarship sign. So it's not like it was a surprise.
Isn't this part of the freedom of choice? She's an adult. She got pregnant, reviewed her options and choices and made the one she thought she could live with. In a perfect world the school would say, "Well, we know we gave you an athletic scholarship and now that you're pregnant you can't perform athletically, but we'll let you keep the scholarship anyway." This isn't a perfect world. Why should the University make exceptions for pregnant women? It's not like there aren't ways to prevent becoming pregnant, chief among them, not having sex.
Now...I know someone reading this is going to jump all over me for that last statement. "But Serena, this is the 21st Century. This is an era of sexual freedom. Women should be allowed to express themselves and their sexuality and not be penalized for it." Blah blah blah.....great. You go ahead and express yourself. The reality is this: You have sex, you run the risk of getting pregnant. Period. It's that simple. Even birth control isn't one hundred percent. It says so on the back of the package for cripes sake.
Freedom of choice doesn't start after you get pregnant. It starts the moment you decide to have sex. Freedom of choice means that you are choosing to accept the responsibity for everything that comes after. It isn't the University's fault that she got pregnant. Think of it this way: If she were a man and on an athletic scholarship and that man violated the terms of the scholarship, would anyone blink when they revoked it? Nope...but this is a PREGNANT woman we're talking about and that evokes all kinds of mushy "AHHHHH" feelings in most people....
Isn't is actually kind of sexist to say that BECAUSE she's pregnant she deserves special treatment? Would she deserve less if her grades had slipped or she had slapped a coach?
Weigh in on this one folks. What do you think?
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