Pregnant at 18. Hailed by Abortion Foes. Punished by Christian School

I can see taking away her student body office, but not letting her walk is something else. All they had top do was put her in among the rest in alpha order.

What message will this send to any other students who end up pregnant? Abortion would be an easier escape route now.

This school missed an opportunity. She did everything the right way after discovering she was pregnant. She confessed. She asked forgiveness. She’s going to spend a lifetime paying for her sin. Not allowing her to graduate is just like heaping coals on her. What the school should have done was removed her from her position as president of student council. Explain to the students that she had confessed and asked forgiveness and now their job was to do what Christ would do: forgive her and support support her and her unborn child. What a testimony of love, repentance/forgiveness and reconciliation that would be for the whole school. I’m glad this young lady has the support of her parents. They seem wonderful.

I don’t think anybody punished her “for her decision to keep her baby.” There were some bad choices that led to there being a baby in the first place. Surely that’s obvious. So there’s a bit of intentional obfuscation going on there in the article. There’s actually no reason at all a student can’t be both disciplined for fornication and lauded for rejecting abortion at the same time. But as for the latter, it’s not like choosing to refrain from killing a defenseless human being is a heroic act. It’s just basic human decency. (Nobody sings my praises for the people I choose not to kill every day.)

A quote from RZ from a number of years back which may have some implications to our thinking.

“We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby.”
The girl was eight months pregnant and had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval.
But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.
The old America had a delicate sense of the difference between the general (“We disapprove”) and the particular (Let’s go help her”). We had the moral self-confidence to sustain the paradox, to sustain the distance between “official” disapproval and “unofficial” succor. The old America would not have applauded the girl in the big graduation gown, but some of its individuals would have helped her not only materially but with some measure of emotional support. We don’t so much anymore. For all our tolerance and talk we don’t show much love to what used to be called girls in trouble. As we’ve gotten more open-minded we’ve gotten more closed-hearted.
Message to society: What you applaud, you encourage. And: Watch out what you celebrate.”

This is a tough situation for all involved. I’m not sure publicly second-guessing is in the best interest of the cause of Christ right now.

[Julie Anne]

What message will this send to any other students who end up pregnant? Abortion would be an easier escape route now.

This school missed an opportunity. She did everything the right way after discovering she was pregnant. She confessed. She asked forgiveness. She’s going to spend a lifetime paying for her sin. Not allowing her to graduate is just like heaping coals on her. What the school should have done was removed her from her position as president of student council. Explain to the students that she had confessed and asked forgiveness and now their job was to do what Christ would do: forgive her and support support her and her unborn child. What a testimony of love, repentance/forgiveness and reconciliation that would be for the whole school. I’m glad this young lady has the support of her parents. They seem wonderful.

One of the consistent elements of the truly repentant throughout Scripture is that they judge their own situation along with its repercussions in a greater manner than they are judged (David and the prodigal son just to name a couple). The unrepentant respond as did Cain—“My punishment is greater than I can bear.”

OK, what about the boy?

It strikes me that a girl walking across the stage great with child is going to feel some shame about this. I would dare suggest that the school may have missed a great chance to communicate the reality of the Gospel to their community here.

Unless he was a student at the same school, they would have no right nor responsibility to deal with him. Admittedly, this is a very tough situation. How should the school have gone about demonstrating forgiveness or communicating the gospel AT the graduation ceremony? To do so earlier with the student body would have been a good move. But what about those attending graduation who have no knowledge of the situation, save the visual evidence of fornication? Should the girl express her repentance to that audience? Should the school make a statement about her sin and repentance to that audience?

Yes, its a tough situation, and I don’t intend to second guess the school on this one.

But what about those attending graduation who have no knowledge of the situation, save the visual evidence of fornication? Should the girl express her repentance to that audience? Should the school make a statement about her sin and repentance to that audience?

No. Let her walk in peace. The people who need to know, already know. Most won’t notice anyway because the gowns are like tents. Graduation should be a celebratory day.

I’m inclined to agree. However, I’m troubled by the indication that she and her parents have engaged an outside group to pressure her school. That does not look like repentance to me. “God in peace” presupposes evidence of repentance. What is the proper response for the school if her posture is defiance?

This is why I am reluctant to try to second guess the school. We don’t know the words and attitudes manifested in private conversations, so on what basis can we correct the action taken by the school, and recommend a different approach. It looks too much like Monday morning quarterbacking, except we can’t claim to have even seen all of the game.

The teen in question said this:

“Some pro-life people are against the killing of unborn babies, but they won’t speak out in support of the girl who chooses to keep her baby,” she said. “Honestly, that makes me feel like maybe the abortion would have been better. Then they would have just forgiven me, rather than deal with this visible consequence.”

I’m certain every single thing mentioned in this thread occurred to the school administrators. I’m also certain they tried to do what they felt was best, balancing the need for grace and compassion (after all, Jesus can and will forgive sexual sin!) and the need to not condone the action, or seeming to condone it to the student body. I had a vaguely similar situation when I was a Pastor, involving a couple which were co-habitating and wanted me to marry them. There are too many extenuating factors to outline here, but bottom line - it was a very tough decision for me to make. I received counsel from several experienced Pastors (all of whom I deeply respect) to go one way, and I ultimately rejected that advice and went the other. My “professional” instincts told me to do one thing, but common sense and the opinion of my deacon (a very intelligent, down to earth, practical kind of guy) told me to do the opposite.

Regarding this teenager, it’s a difficult decision. It’s impossible to understand the dynamics of the situation from our keyboards. I would tend towards grace. Others would tend towards the other option. Very hard to have to make these decisions.

But, I do wonder how the NYT got hold of this story … That’s the real story.

…finally got to the article, and here’s what I notice. First of all, the boy is not at the school, and they’re not going to get married—it may be he’s not a believer. Maybe.

Lot of things out there. To me, it’s telling that Students for Life thought there was something remarkable about her keeping her baby. Think about that one a minute; is something in what “we” are currently doing sending young ladies from our churches to the abortion mills? That’s what Guttmacher suggests, although it’s not clear what portion of “Christian” young women served by Planned Infanticide are of the evangelical/fundamental stripe.

And let’s be blunt here about what her punishment is. She apologized before the whole school, went to talk about her experience with Students for Life, is carrying a baby through her last semester in school, and is suffering huge hits to her career and marriage prospects. Preventing her from graduating is simply salt in the wounds, an injury that is going to make Planned Parenthood seem like a better option to many.

Which is, I’d guess, why the family asked the school to reconsider. There are sins committed where perhaps the church ought to be harsher, but this simply isn’t one of them.

FYI, she is not being prevented from graduating. She is graduating.

However, I wonder if someone might explain what it is about grace and forgiveness that makes not marching an unjust consequence? Why does grace and forgiveness require that?

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

I think that the decision to bar her from walking is wrong and gutless. There are plenty of consequences for getting pregnant out of wedlock, and piling on by barring her from her high school graduation is ridiculous and petty. I have to wonder if part of it is motivated by a desire to keep their ‘testimony’ pure by not having a ‘sinner’ walk for commencement. She sinned, just like all of us do, and barring her from graduation limelight just reinforces the temptation that she is already dealing with - it would have been far better to abort her son, go to BJU, and pursue whatever her original plan than to repent and deal with the consequences of her sin. At least people would understand and forgive her for murder instead of just sexual sin. Pregnant and unmarried women who are seeking to rebuild their lives need help from God’s people, not more condemnation from the church or our organizations. And doesn’t the Bible say something about ministering to widows and orphans anyway?

However, I wonder if someone might explain what it is about grace and forgiveness that makes not marching an unjust consequence? Why does grace and forgiveness require that?

Why should premarital sex keep someone from marching with their class? I’m not seeing a direct correlation between the two. If she had assaulted a teacher or set fire to the school property, then OK.

Furthermore, she got pregnant in Dec/January. Not in May/June, when graduation is occuring - her father is right to note that the punishment should have been served when she confessed, not several months after the fact.