Pregnant and Parenting Teens

Since 1972, when Title IX was enacted, it has been illegal for schools to exclude pregnant and parenting students from school. Despite this fact, many schools fail to help pregnant and parenting teens stay in school, and some actually exclude or punish them.

08/24/2012

What’s Wrong with Blaming Teen Parents?

By Denicia Cadena & Micaela Cadena. According to recent data, New Mexico has the 2nd highest teen pregnancy rate in the country; it follows that New Mexico has high numbers of parents who had their first children as teenagers. As a young mama recently shared,

08/06/2012

Pregnant and Parenting Teens

Get Tested Or Get Out: School Forces Pregnancy Tests on Girls, Kicks out Students Who Refuse or are Pregnant

By Tiseme Zegeye, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 12:33pm

In a Louisiana public school, female students who are suspected of being pregnant are told that they must take a pregnancy test. Under school policy...

06/21/2012

Title IX

Quilting is not Geometry: Pregnant and Parenting Teens Deserve an Education Free from Discrimination

By Tiseme Zegeye, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 2:21pm

This Saturday marks the 40^th anniversary of the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the landmark law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities. Among its other, better-known applications (for example, mandating equality in athletics), Title IX bans discrimination against pregnant and parenting students. Title IX’s regulations mandate that schools cannot apply school policies differently on the basis of sex based on marital or parental status, nor can a school discriminate against or exclude any person “on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, termination of pregnancy, or recovery therefrom.”