Over winter break I reread the book Finding Colin Firth by Mia March. The story is told in the 3rd person but switches between the lives of three main characters, Gemma, Bea, and Veronica, in each chapter. To give a quick rundown of the pot, the novel starts with Bea finding out in a deathbed confessional from her mother that she was adopted. She then travels to Boothbay Harbor, Maine in search of Veronica, her birth mother. Veronica grew up in Boothbay, but when she became pregnant with Bea at sixteen, was exiled to Hope Home, a house for pregnant teens on the outskirts of town. After giving up Bea for adoption, she moved throughout the US waitressing and trying to forget her painful past, before returning to Boothbay to face her demons. The final character in this convoluted trio is Gemma. After losing her job and finding out she is pregnant, she comes to Boothbay to attend a friend’s wedding, but ends up staying to write a piece on Hope Home’s fiftieth anniversary for the local newspaper. It is through this article that she meets Bea, who is at Hope Home visiting where she was born. The two become friends and Gemma supports Bea as she makes contact with Veronica for the first time.
This is certainly not the most academic book I have ever read, and it commits one of my cardinal sins of literature, typos in a published work, but it has a lot of heart. The characters pull you in and offer compelling narratives. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the novel, however, are the moments when Gemma interviews various people connected to Hope Home. Each person brings a new element to the story, whether they be a current resident, an adoptive parent, a past resident, or anything else that links them to the topic of teenage pregnancy. The author does a fantastic job of taking into account as many points of view as possible and offering the negatives alongside the positives. Yes, the book has a happy ending, but it also addresses many of the sadnesses that come out of having a teenage pregnancy not only today but in the past as well.
This topic is a social movement in the sense that is an issue many are working towards acknowledging and preventing. As you can see from the graphs, teenage pregnancy has been more or less constantly trending downward.
According to this article, two of the biggest reasons for this decrease are changing attitudes towards sex and sexuality, and better knowledge and use of contraceptives. More young people are being taught about sex and how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, two topics that were taboo in the 1960’s, when teenage pregnancy was at its peak. The article also says that the stable economy and promise of jobs in the mid 1990’s encouraged an overall decline in teen birth rates. In my personal opinion, I feel this plays to a larger factor of changing attitudes towards women’s roles. Back in the sixties it was expected that many women would be wives and mothers, careers or goals outside of the home weren’t really options for them. However, times have changed and more people are instilling in young girls the belief that they can do anything they set their minds to. I think this is encouraging them to be more careful in their sexuality, because they know they have big futures ahead of them and don’t want their plans derailed by an unexpected pregnancy.
