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PAGE 12
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 13, 1985
pregnancy is widely viewed.!! the very hub of the u.s. poverty
cycle••••
Among the underclass in A merica's urban ghettos, the trends are
especially disturbing.
Nearly half of black females in the
u.s. are pregnant by age 20.
The pregancy rate among those
ages 15 to
19
is almost twice what it is among whites. worse
still, nearly 90 percent of the babies born to blacks in this
age group are born out of wedlock; most are raised in
fatherless homes with little economic opportunity. "When
you
look at the numbers, teenage pregnancies are of cosmic danger
to the black community," declares Eleanor Holmes Norton, law
professor at Ge orgetown University and a leading black
scholar••••
Unwed motherhood may even seem glamorous to impressionable
teens.
"They see Jerry Hall on TV, flinging back her hair,
talking about having Mick Jagger's second [out-of-wedlock]
child and saying what a wonderful life she has," bristles
Daphne Busby of Brooklyn, founder of the Sisterhood of Black
Single Mothers•••• Social workers are almost unanimous in
citing the influence of the popular media--television, rock
music,
videos, movies--in
propelling the
trend toward
precocious sexuality••••
Again, where are the church leaders' condemnations of the sin of
fornication?
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau
•