Designs finished for Canberra College to help out the teen mothers

childcare_worker said :

This program is for both gender males and females

How insulting!! “

Both genders,” how Benny Hill is that!!

Won’t someone think of the gay/lesbian/transsexual/transgender/undecided/bit of this bit of that/half rice half chips community?

This program is for both gender males and females

gooterz said :

Women only?

No, young fathers too.

Pork Hunt said :

That is a serious amount of money for a fetus frightening room. Is a machine that goes “bing” included?

It’s a school, I don’t think they have give birth there, well at least not on purpose.

gooterz said :

Women only?

Nothing in the documentation says “women only”, there is an effort to talk mostly in a non-gender specific way. But which ever way you look at it, the cold hard reality is that this is overwhelmingly an issue which affects women, right from the part where just being pregnant interrupts their schooling in a way which it doesn’t for the male who provided the sperm, through to the part where they are the one most likely to end up with primary caregiver responsibilities. So of course some of the facilities are specfically targetted to women.

I remember at high school in Woden in the early 1970s our principal begging the editor at The Canberra Times not to publish a story that four girls were pregnant. One of the girls was a friend of mine and I used to hang around with her and her girlfriend. I didn’t know she was pregnant at the time.

When I went to Phillip College a year later someone told me how I was almost framed as the baby’s father. The real father had left Canberra and couldn’t be contacted. Her parents wanted her to have the baby and for me to pay maintenance. It was a silly idea because I was openly gay and the whole school knew about it.

Abortion back then was illegal and shameful but there was a doctor in Belconnen who did backyard abortions and she went there to get fixed up. She had to leave school and start work to pay for it in instalments.

When I read about initiatives such as this it is easy to forget how far we’ve come and how attitudes toward teen mums have changed.

gooterz said :

Women only?

It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

/Python

I benefited from this program (or an early incarnation of it) back when it was still Philip College. This was about 20 years ago now and I don’t remember enough to comment on it’s usefulness, but my mum might I should ask her.

Women only?

That is a serious amount of money for a fetus frightening room. Is a machine that goes “bing” included?

An excellent program, great stuff