Pregnant Teens Have Bellies Banned from Yearbook

Teenage pregnancy is a fact of life. But it seems more and more high schools want to pretend it’s not when it comes to the pages of its yearbooks. First, a North Carolina school banned a photo of Caitlin Tiller and her infant. And now, a Michigan high school has edited out full-body shots of two pregnant students.

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“What’s the difference of letting me walk for graduation, letting me walk around the school? It’s the same thing,” Kimberly Haney told a local news station WOOD-TV after explaining that her pregnant belly wouldn’t be allowed to show in any of her White Cloud High School yearbook photos.

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Superintendent Barry Seabrook admitted to the news station that he agreed there wasn’t a difference but wanted to keep parents from complaining. Allowing the photos to remain would also be “contrary to” the Michigan statewide mandate of abstinence-only based sex education, he told the Associated Press. Seabrook did not return a call from Yahoo! Shine.

“It’s not like I was holding my belly. I wasn’t promoting it in any way. It’s just a full body picture,” Haney told WOOD-TV. Haney’s classmates elected her and her boyfriend most likely to get married, and in the offending photo, he was pretending to propose to her. But her baby bump was showing. Haney has been tweeting about her pregnancy lately, announcing that she’s having a boy whom she’ll name Trenton Dean, writing “Bought the baby so much stuff today,” and gushing, “Being able to see my belly move when Trenton moves!”

Deonna Harris, another pregnant senior, was also told that a photo in which her belly showed would not make it into the yearbook. “It made me tear up. I was trying to hold it back because I didn't want everyone to ask me why I was crying and stuff,” Harris said. Her photo will be re-shot without her belly in the frame.

But Jessica Sheets Pika of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy told Yahoo! Shine, “Ignoring a problem rarely makes it go away.” While she does understand that superintendents have “a lot to worry about,” including the opinions of parents, and how their school appears to other districts, obscuring the realities of teen pregnancy doesn’t strike her as the best solution. “Talking is a great way of educating,” she said, “and ignoring usually is not.”