The Baby Fog: Are Fantasies of Family Affecting Your Behavior?

LAURA: So, you’re in your 20’s. The last thing in the world you want is a baby…right?

You’ve got to get a job, maybe finish college. You’re settling into an apartment, making new friends.

With all that, who has time for 3 a.m. feedings? Certainly not you.

And yet…

We’ve got some startling responses from a new national survey, which suggest that a surprisingly large percentage of you wouldn’t mind becoming parents right now.

So…what’s up with that?

I’m Laura Sessions Stepp. And this is Sex. Really.

In today’s podcast, we’re going to dig into this survey, which is called “The Fog Zone: How Misperceptions, Magical Thinking and Ambivalence Put Young Adults at Risk for Unplanned Pregnancy.” It was commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy with the help of the Guttmacher Institute. The National Campaign also sponsors this podcast.

First— some background:

For women in their 20s, 7 out of 10 pregnancies are unplanned. This results in more than a million births, miscarriages or abortions each year.

These rates are higher than in several other developed countries. With more good methods of contraception available than ever before, why are so many young Americans not using them, or not using them properly?

I put that question to Kelleen Kaye, senior director of research at the National Campaign.

Kaye: There is just such a cynicism and mistrust of contraception, it seems. It’s like— either I’ve never heard of it, or I think it doesn’t work, or I think it’s going to do me serious harm.

Laura: Where does that distrust come from?

Kaye: Well, I think there are probably a couple of things going on. For one thing, most of these young adults report that the last time they had sex-ed was a very long time ago. They’ve forgotten a lot of it. Or when they were getting that information it just didn’t sink in, because they weren’t at that point in their lives yet. There’s, you know, a lot of debate about comprehensive sex-ed, abstinence education, but I really think across the board we just don’t do a very good job educating our young people.

LAURA: The Internet, of course, offers lots of information about sexual health and pregnancy. But, Kaye says, sorting facts from fiction can be overwhelming. And scary.

Kaye: Yes they have all this great information at their fingertips, they also have a lot of really bad information or misinformation, and I think human nature tends to elevate the scary news—you know, the one person who thinks that she got cancer from an IUD. It’s the scariest stories that we tend to repeat and the Internet probably does that tenfold.

LAURA: If you doubt what Kaye is saying, try googling any health question and see what you come up with. The Internet is so full of horror stories, it’s easy to believe that everything is dangerous.

Kaye: We looked at a variety of different measures, and it turns out that young adults, A) haven’t heard of a lot of these different contraceptive methods, or say that they know very little about them, B) they don’t think they’re very effective—a lot of them say even when you are on the pill you still have a 50-50 shot at getting pregnant, and C) these methods are almost certain to cause you serious health problems, like cancer. So they haven’t heard very much about these methods, but what they have heard, they really don’t like.

So it’s really only about half of young adults who are using some kind of contraception really consistently.

Laura: One out of two are using contraception—that’s astounding!

Kaye: That’s huge! There’s a huge sense of fatalism. We asked the question, whether or not you agree with the following statement: Whether I use birth control or not, when it’s time for me to get pregnant, I will. I think over a third strongly agreed with that statement. There is this feeling that it is just beyond their control, there’s nothing they can do about it. Even though there are so many different methods of contraception available. We’re seeing misperception, lack of information and ambivalence about starting a family across all of the sub-groups that we looked at.

Laura: I want to talk a little bit about that ambivalence. My vision of the twenty-something is that they are career-oriented, or at least job-oriented. They want to get on their own, live their life, buy a car, and get an apartment. The last thing they want to do is get pregnant or have a baby. But you coined the word ambivalence. That they’re ambivalent about parenthood. Tell us what you mean by that.

Kaye: The first half of what you said is true. They very strongly say that they don’t want to get pregnant right now. And yet, if you then say, but what if you found out that you were pregnant, how would you feel about that? A third of them say they would be at least a little bit happy about that.

Now we start to think about babies, start to think about buying baby clothes, start to imagine life with your partner. And yeah—I’d be at least a little bit happy about that. We found a lot of people expressing their expectation that they will marry and have a child with their current partner. They’re already expecting that, even the teens, the 18 and 19-year-olds.

Laura: Even the 18 and 19 year olds?

Kaye: Very few said they thought it would hurt their relationship with their partner. So there is a very strong expectation that everything would be fine.

Laura: And what do the data tell us about those expectations that they have?

Kaye: That’s where our concerns come in. We’re certainly not saying that it’s wrong for young people to aspire to parenthood. That’s a wonderful thing. And we’re not saying that it’s wrong to have expectations that you’re going to have this wonderful long-term relationship with your partner. But the concern lies in the fact that when we look at the national data, most of these relationships don’t translate into long-term relationships, and certainly don’t translate into marriage. Babies don’t tend to solidify relationships, they make them more complicated. The reality is that you need a stable, committed relationship in order to thrive as parents. But I think now the expectation is that long, happy, committed, healthy relationship results from having a baby, but it’s really the other way around.

LAURA: Kelleen later told me that it was the romanticizing of family that knocked her off her feet. After all, this isn’t the 1950s. Young adults stay in college longer than they used to. They work longer before getting married. So this generation doesn’t spend much time thinking about babies in their twenties, right?

Wrong. As the Fog Zone Report shows, even though girls and guys know it takes a lot to raise a baby, they want to do it anyway.

When our reporter Veralyn Williams asked young people how they’d feel if they were pregnant right now, we got a full range of answers.

Veralyn: How would you react if I told right now you were going to have a baby?

Shira: Hmm…I would freak out. It’s just not something I want to deal with, at least for another couple of years.

Veralyn: Do you know anyone who has ever had an unplanned pregnancy?

Rodrick: Myself, yes.

Veralyn: Tell me how did you feel when she told you she was pregnant?

Rodrick: I was just really scared. I was young; I was nervous. But I stepped up to my responsibility and I have a beautiful six-year-old child.

Veralyn: How would you react if I told you right now you were going to have another baby?

Rodrick: I’d f*[bleep] run, dude. I don’t think that I’m ready for that. That would be a big shocker and I’d be very scared.

Veralyn: How react if I told you right now that you were pregnant?

Tenika: I think I’m kind of in a place where I probably can have a baby and be okay, just because of the person I’m with and because of our future. I think it’s bright. And I’m confident that we can take on a baby and we have the support we need. So I guess I’d be cool with it.

LAURA: Babies are a lot of work, but babies also give back. Sure, they cry and demand to be held. But they also cuddle, and laugh at the silliest things.

Let’s not forget how much fun they can be – or even thinking about them can be. Twenty-two-year-old Lillie, an occasional contributor to Sex. Really., loves the idea of babies.

Lillie: I’ve always loved babies. All the little parts— the baby shoes and a nursery and bath toys and baby powder. It’s that smell! But they are, though— they’re so sweet and they have all their gear and all their accessories. I don’t know, I mean, like if my boyfriend came to me and was like, “Maybe we should just start having babies,” I think there’d be a huge part of me that would be happy to have a baby right now. But I’d also be giving up so many things I want to do with the rest of my twenties. It wouldn’t be terrible. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. But it will be a better thing when I’m older.

LAURA: When I listen to Lillie and the others, I’m reminded that we spend an awful lot of time talking about the difficulties of young parenthood, rather than the joy that babies can bring.

Shouldn’t the conversation mention both?

The Fog Zone report advises addressing this desire for babies. Perhaps even change the mantra from “preventing pregnancy” to “delaying pregnancy.” I like that idea. Because it gives at least a fair nod to the wonder of raising children someday, in all their messy glory.

I’m Laura Sessions Stepp and this is Sex.Really. We’ll be back in January with Relationship Resolutions for the New Year. And I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at @thenc.org.