(This is a repost from our old blog. It was originally posted on 20th June 2008)

Was your heart broken today when you heard the story of the young ladies at the high school in Gloucester, Mass. who had made a pact to become pregnant, and had become a cluster of teenage mothers?

The TODAY program interviewed another young lady from the area who had become a mother 3 years earlier, at the age of 15 – not as part of a “pact”, but as one of the many teenagers who become pregnant because our society has failed to provide them with a foundation of God’s family plan.

“You lose everything,” she said. “You lose your friends. You lose being able to go out. I know a lot of people that like to go out every night. You can’t really do it. You lose — you lose everything.” She is so right; above all, these young women have lost a treasure that God wants them to have — the unwrapping of the gift of themselves, holy and set aside, for the partner God has chosen for them.  Paul wrote to Timothy “Now flee from youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart” (2 Timothy 2:22).

For all these new mom’s there are moments they will never have .. the first kiss with their new husband. The first intimate moments. The shared wonder of the birth of a first child … all traded for what seems to have become the latest fashion accessory, a source of unconditional love.

I can’t help wondering how different the lives of these young ladies, and their babies, would have been if they had been exposed to the FamilyLife® Passport to Purity (see http://www.familylife.com/site/c.dnJHKLNnFoG/b.3955827/k.902E/Passport2Purity.htm)  — a weekend program to prepare preteens for physical changes to come, preempt peer pressure and build in biblical principles on dating and sex. Maybe the girls would have said “I won’t until I say I do” …