“I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen,” cries a toddler featured in New York City’s controversial new anti-teenage pregnancy campaign. The posters plastered across subways walls and buses featuring toddlers with startlingly poor prospects due to the fact that they were born to teenage mothers.
The ads, which were meant to shame and stigmatize teenage pregnancy, took the already existing stigma of being a teen parent to a new extreme.
Unlike the similar advertisements meant to stigmatize smoking and drunk driving, what teen parents need, after the fact, is not shame but support.
The Schreiber Times finds these advertisements not only ineffective but unnecessarily hurtful. The Schreiber Times urges readers to recognize that, both within the school community and elsewhere, those who are going through hard times should be supported, and not stigmatized.