We’re already fully aware of the overwhelmingly largest factor in teen pregnancy: poverty.

Say it again! Poverty!

It’s pretty easy to figure out. Aside from the fact that poverty often prevents young people from being able to obtain birth control and abortions, if you’re fairly destitute, it doesn’t necessarily make that much sense to a young girl to wait to start a family. When there are no middle class incentives, it’s damn-near impossible to impose middle-class values. Telling a girl from the ghetto, barrio, reservation, or trailer park to wait to have kids doesn’t have much resonance when a family is potentially one of the only truly rewarding projects she can look forward to. (Wait? Wait for what? Grad school?)

Combine that with a chronically deficient sex education system and you’ve got yourself a recipe for “babies having babies.” The state of Illinois recently expanded its sex ed program, but Chicago’s teen pregnancy rate is still 1.5 times the national average and well above the levels of other developed countries. So what’s the answer? Should we invest in free clinics? Or maybe in education or jobs or social programs that give young people a future with goals that aren’t child-rearing?

No! We should make super-creepy ads and put them on public transportation! Because that’s what the kids like nowadays—it’s all Justin Bieber and Tumblr and ads on the sides of buses! It’s so easy—why didn’t we think of it sooner?
 

 
Chicago launched a poster campaign depicting pregnant teen boys because… I have no idea. I guess they wanted to illustrate that fathers have parental responsibilities, too? Thing is, statistically, they don’t. Only about 58% of child support gets collected in this country, and while I’m not one to deny the existence of dead-beat dads, how in the hell is a boy in high school going to support a baby anyway? Oh. right, I know, drop out! Nothing like a vicious cycle to really set up a kid for success!

Earlier this year, my own city of New York released a similarly creepy campaign trying to “convince” teens not have babies with a winning combination of shame and patronizing them—teens love that! The affect is one of being lectured by one’s own hypothetical future children, if your hypothetical future children use comic sans and lecture you like stupid white men who work in the Mayor’s office.
 

 
I know the people in charge are out of touch, and I know most likely that they have never been poor. But were they never teenagers, either?