Preventing Teen Pregnancy

In response to “Perspectives on Teen Pregnancy,” Commentary, Feb. 5:

I was shocked to read about the 13-year-old girl, in Regina T. Montoya’s article, who had sex with three young men, one of them being 19, in Texas. The shock wasn’t from the fact that she had sex with three guys during school hours, or that she gave each of them a condom. What shocked me was the stance taken by Montoya indicating that the boys, and other males that engage in sex with consenting young females, should be prosecuted. Why punish a male for engaging in sex that is freely offered to him? Is the girl not equally responsible for her own actions? I could understand, and agree with, prosecution if the encounter were rape, but in a situation where the girl consents to, or even requests the sexual encounter, she should be held equally accountable for any future consequence.

Knowing that the concern is to prevent teenage pregnancies, the obvious solution is to educate young girls, and the men they are willingly having sex with about the possible outcomes (e.g. pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.). Jailing a male for having sex with a young girl won’t solve anything. It will only give a different male the opportunity to engage in sex with a young, sexually uneducated, consenting female.

MICHAEL ANTHONY

Del Mar

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* Tonya Joyner writes that Clinton must be “out of his mind” to involve MTV in his campaign to reduce teen pregnancy (Commentary, Feb. 4). I don’t know. To me it seems sort of smart to put the message where it will be seen by potentially pregnant teenage girls.

MATTY PARK

Sylmar

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* So now Gov. Pete Wilson is striking a blow against teenage pregnancies and mothers and kids on welfare. As usual, he is attacking the symptoms and not the cause. When will Bill and Bob and Newt and Pete realize they’ll never stop babies being conceived until they do something about the reason babies are conceived?

A large segment of our population sincerely believes that we have the right to tell a woman what to do with her body, so why can’t we tell men what they can do with theirs? We could end most welfare as we know it and all we would have to do is pass a law that decrees that any man, regardless of his religion, race, IQ, financial status, profession, age, or anything else, who fathers a second child whom, for any reason, he cannot or will not financially support, will, at state expense, and whether he wants it or not, be given a vasectomy. That way, he can have his fun, but will not create any more children that other people have to support.

That’s much better and cheaper than throwing mothers and children off welfare. After all, real men really don’t like to see children starve.

B.G. HUSTON

Seal Beach