Million in ’84 : Teen-Age Pregnancies on the Rise

Melaina Kuhl’s room speaks of childhood cut short and shared. On one side of the room are her schoolbooks, photos of favorite horses and pastel figurines of young girls in ruffles. In the center is a water bed. On the other side is a white wicker crib and a wall decorated with wooden cutouts of a teddy bear and the letters ABC.

That side is for Krystal--the infant whom Melaina delivered two weeks after her 16th birthday.

Melaina is one of more than a million American teen-agers who became pregnant last year. “The pregnancy changed my whole life,” she said, blond bangs brushing her eyes as she cradled her 4-day-old daughter. Before, she explained: “I didn’t have anybody to hold on to.”

Liberals and conservatives argue bitterly over how to prevent or cope with such pregnancies. But nearly everyone agrees that it is a problem--and one that is growing.

The United States has the highest adolescent pregnancy rate compared to five similarly industrialized countries (the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada and England/Wales), according to a study released in March by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the nonprofit research arm of Planned Parenthood and the generally accepted clearinghouse for information on adolescent pregnancy.

In the United States each year, 96 of every 1,000 girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant--four-fifths by mistake, according to the Guttmacher Institute. If sexual activity continues to rise, 40% of all 14-year-olds in the United States today will be pregnant at least once before they are 20, the institute projects.

Within the United States, teen pregnancy rates are higher among Latinas and blacks than among Anglos. But the institute reports that a two-thirds rise in teen-age sexual activity nationally from 1972 to 1980 is accounted for totally by Anglos, and notably those under 15. One reason, suggested Barbara Parks, Guttmacher’s assistant director of communications, is that sexual messages in advertising have become more obvious in middle-class society.

Ethnic-Racial Breakdown

In California, Anglos accounted for 48% of the known teen pregnancies in 1981, Latinas 26% and blacks 18%, according to the California Senate Office of Research. Most Anglos and blacks (56%) obtained abortions; most Latinas (58.3%) gave birth.

While couples wanting to adopt outnumber available babies 40 to 1, only 4% of all teen mothers nationally relinquish their children.

If they do not have abortions, most pregnant teens, like Melaina, choose to keep their babies.

Counselors and health educators say that many girls want to keep their children in hopes of finding love or an identity in motherhood; some may be swayed by religion or family tradition. But what they can expect--statistically--is to forgo a high school diploma, live below the poverty line and become dependent on social services. More than others, young mothers and their children are prone to serious--sometimes life-endangering--health problems. A marriage to the father is more likely than others to end in separation or divorce.

Unlike past generations, this one is characterized by a lack of hope for the future while at the same time it is bombarded with romantic notions of sex and pregnancy, said Gayle Nathanson, executive director of the Youth and Family Center in Lawndale. (The center’s Early Parenting Program for pregnant and parenting teens is one of two model programs in the state offering comprehensive services to teen-age parents.) Nathanson observed: “It (pressure) comes from all sides: They are educated to be sexually active but not sexually responsible. Schools make a cursory attempt, but the family is often isolated.

“Maybe their homes aren’t stable. Maybe they’re not doing well in school. One way of achieving an identity resolution is to become a parent.”

Melaina lives in Costa Mesa with her mother, grandmother, uncle, sister and now her daughter.

A year ago, she was spending her spare time speed-skating or hanging out at the beach. She aspired to be a model. With makeup, Melaina at 15 could pass for 21. Then, she would order wine coolers or bourbon and lemon-lime. “I look at girls my age and think I never swished my tail around like that,” she says now, her face devoid of makeup, as she nursed her baby. “But, yeah, I was like that.”

Like most teen-agers, Melaina was aware of the risks of sex and knew about birth control. Her mother helped her buy birth control pills after learning that Melaina was sexually active. But Melaina didn’t take the pills regularly. She felt, rather than thought, that she would--somehow--be personally exempted from biological consequences, that it would never happen to her.

Last summer, after Melaina became unusually lethargic and gained weight, her mother took her for a pregnancy test. When her mother told her she was six-weeks pregnant, she walked out on the jetty at Newport Beach, looked at the rocks and thought about jumping. (Studies show teen mothers attempt suicide at a rate seven times greater than the national average.)

Drug-Dealing Father

Marriage was not an option for Melaina. Her boyfriend, an 18-year-old who dealt drugs, denied he was Krystal’s father. A born-again Christian, Melaina would not consider abortion. God told her, she said, not to give her child up for adoption.

Sitting in their living room, her 37-year-old mother, Misty Kuhl, also a born-again Christian, nods with approval. “You must take responsibility for everything you do. I know she made the right decision.”

Melaina, she said, was the result of her own “first encounter” at 19. Kuhl married Melaina’s father after she became pregnant, but they were separated before Melaina was born. Her second child was the accidental result of changing birth control pills, she said. The child’s father, a biker, was “not the marrying kind.”

A postal carrier, Kuhl once bought and sold horses. She bought one for Melaina. “I spoiled her rotten, but I didn’t give her what she needed--me. I wanted her to be my friend . . . my buddy.”

“I always felt that she forgot about me,” Melaina said.

She knew her mother had a drug problem. But when Kuhl was out, Melaina stole her mother’s marijuana and drank her beer.

Melaina, her mother said, grew up watching her mother drift “from one man to another, looking for something that wasn’t there.” She saw one boyfriend beat her mother unconscious on the bathroom floor.

“This is a dramatic family,” Kuhl said. Melaina nodded, laughing.

Mother and daughter laugh a lot, talking together about the past as if their lives were a country-Western song, full of good times, hard living and regret. Chuckling, Kuhl and Melaina reel off the cliches they’ve lived: “What if . . .” “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” and, “Like mother, like daughter.”

Learns the Hard Way

Even though Kuhl had talked to her daughter about sex, she said, “You can’t tell them anything. They have to experiment. They use parents as their prime example. Unfortunately, Melaina learned the hard way, as I did.”

Melaina said she was 13 when she first had sex; the boy was 18. Because she wanted to be accepted, she pretended to be experienced, she said. That same year, she visited a 17-year-old neighbor at his house. They went into his room and closed the door. When they didn’t come out, his mother called her mother and they confronted the pair in bed. After that, Kuhl insisted that Melaina obtain birth control pills.

Sometimes, when they went out, “I’d say, ‘Mom, I need more birth control pills,’ ” Melaina recalled. But instead of getting the pills, Melaina said, they would be distracted and “always end up doing something else.”

Once her daughter was pregnant, however, Kuhl took Melaina to a doctor for regular prenatal care. Melaina took prenatal vitamins and quit smoking, but ate, she said, “what I wanted to eat.”

Melaina’s labor was a short two hours. Krystal weighed a healthy 7 pounds, 13 ounces.

“The world does not like adolescents,” said Adele Hofmann, professor of pediatrics at UC Irvine Medical School and former president of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. “We shove them in school and say, ‘Do what I tell you, but be like an adult.’ ” Yet, while they are not prepared to take on parenthood, their bodies are becoming biologically ready at earlier ages, she said. In America today, the average girl starts to menstruate at age 12 1/2 compared to 14 1/2 at the turn of the century.

And contrary to popular opinion, any girl who has begun menstruating is capable of becoming pregnant even at age 10, Hofmann said. In fact, children of adolescents may weigh more and be more vigorous at birth than those of women at 20 or 25--if the young mothers do not delay proper nutrition and prenatal care, she said.

“But that’s a big if ,” Hofmann added. In 1978, half of the expectant mothers ages 15 to 17 and two-thirds of those under 15 received no prenatal care in the critical first three months of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute. So many pregnant teens put off finding out whether they are pregnant, deciding what to do and obtaining care that organizations such as the March of Dimes have targeted them for education programs to prevent low birth weight, prematurity, birth defects and other problems associated with delayed prenatal care.

Bleak Futures

But, according to national researchers, the most far-reaching consequence of teen-age childbearing is that the young parents may be doomed to either unemployment or low incomes because they quit high school. In California, 80% of teen mothers drop out. San Francisco’s Teen-age Pregnancy and Parenting Project noted that 40% of its teen fathers had quit school as soon as they heard the news.

Those statistics represent millions of welfare dollars. For example, in California alone, even a 10% increase in the number of teen mothers finishing high school would save $53 million in welfare costs, according to research by the UC San Francisco Center for Population and Reproduction Health Policy. Nearly 60% of California’s total welfare budget provides payments to women who first gave birth as teen-agers, said Claire Brindis, associate director of the center.

Only 119 of California’s 1,034 school districts now operate “pregnant minor programs,” which aim to keep pregnant teens in school, said Mary Lou Williams, regional representative of the California Alliance Concerned with School Age Parents. The programs generally offer alternative academic instruction and tutoring in prenatal care and child development to pregnant girls from the 7th to 12th grades. Some feature job training and counseling to prevent repeat pregnancies. About half include infant care for young mothers.

A 1984 report from the state Senate Office of Research substantiated a need for more comprehensive services to pregnant adolescents. This year, $5 million of the state budget has been set aside to finance case workers to shepherd teens into existing programs. “A lot of the problems teens have is not knowing what resources exist and following up,” Brindis said. In Orange County, only 300 of the estimated 3,000 teen-agers who are currently pregnant are enrolled in the schools’ “pregnant minor programs.” Where are the other 2,700? “It’s a big question,” said Cynthia Sheinberg, executive director of the Coalition Concerned with Adolescent Pregnancy, a Santa Ana-based information and education project. “For whatever reasons, they’re not in school, and we don’t know how to find them.”

With her newly bulging abdomen, Melaina was too embarrassed to enter high school last fall. But instead of dropping out, she enrolled as a sophomore in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s School Age Mother Program. There, with individual attention, Melaina’s grades jumped from Ds and Cs to As and Bs.

Eventually, Melaina wants to earn her own way. She dreams of becoming a lawyer.

But meanwhile, Melaina and her daughter live on her mother’s paycheck, her uncle’s salary as a mechanic and her grandmother’s retirement checks. In January, Melaina filed with the county Social Services Agency for federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) payments. By the time Krystal was born, Melaina had received $184 for “emergency relief.” She now receives $210 a month in AFDC funds.

(To discourage welfare dependency, AFDC applicants are asked to cooperate with the district attorney in proving paternity and forcing the father to provide financial support. Melaina’s paternity suit against her ex-boyfriend is pending.)

Returns to School

Three weeks after delivery, Melaina returned to the School Age Mother Program with Krystal on her lap. Under the program, mothers like Melaina may stay a semester after giving birth. After that, they are on their own. To finish high school, Melaina knows she will have to find day care for Krystal. And what of Krystal’s future?

Echoing Misty Kuhl’s belief that children repeat their parents’ experience, the Guttmacher Institute reports that 43% of fathers age 17 and under and 22% of teen-age mothers 17 and under had a teen-age parent themselves. That is twice the rate for girls and five times the rate for boys who wait until age 25 or later to have children.

Melaina vows that Krystal will be 25--and married--before she has a child.

Her mother looks at her fondly and laughs. “Look who’s talking.”

For a related story on teen-age abortion, please turn to View, Part V, Page 1.