Coalition Offers Battle Plan to Tackle Teen Pregnancies in County : Youth and sex: Group calls for teaching of abstinence and more services for young mothers but skirts controversial birth-control, abortion issues.

A group that has been studying teen pregnancy in Orange County for two years issued its plan Thursday for combatting the problem--teaching abstinence at an early age and providing more services for adolescent mothers.

But the group carefully skirted the more controversial issues of birth control and abortion.

“Right now we need to pull together as a community to prevent adolescent pregnancy,” said Patricia Boortz, coordinator of the Adolescent Pregnancy ChildWatch project, a broad-based Orange County coalition. The group presented its recommendations at a briefing attended by about 85 community leaders, including Orange County Supervisors Thomas F. Riley, Roger R. Stanton and Don R. Roth, and Msgr. John F. Sammon, vicar for pastoral and community affairs of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

“We want to be clear in our message to our adolescents and the community,” Boortz said. “We want to delay adolescent pregnancy and childbearing until an age they can make better decisions for their future.”

In Orange County, about 3,200 girls under age 18 give birth every year, and more pregnancies are occurring at earlier ages, according to the ChildWatch research project, “Our Future at Risk: A Call for Action,” released last year. An additional 6,000 a year obtain abortions, according to the Coalition Concerned With Adolescent Pregnancy.

Margie Fites Seigel, head of the local Planned Parenthood organization, called the recommendations “a terrific beginning.” But, she said: “We also need to be realistic.

“For those teens who choose to be sexually involved, they absolutely must have access to birth control services to help prevent that pregnancy. And in the situation where the birth control fails, or they find themselves pregnant, they must have access to prenatal care and abortion services.”

Many of the project’s suggestions offer no specific ways of implementation, she said.

Some of the key recommendations are:

“Activating the medical community, both private and public, to increase access to health care for all adolescents.” Although the report did not specify this, Boortz said coalition members believe that school-based health-care clinics should be launched to offer counseling and information about birth control. Birth control devices might also be available at a clinic, “but I’m not sure our county is ready to accept that,” she said.

A hot line for teens “to have immediate 24-hour referral resources and crisis intervention.”

Additional support for programs that foster completing high school and early education in self-esteem, communication, practical living skills, family life and responsibility for self.

Improving and expanding public and private services to adolescents.

Encouraging programs to help teens resist peer pressure.

Obtaining the involvement of more religious and community groups and corporate institutions, and mobilizing political support.

The suggestions come the same week a 15-year-old Santiago High School student delivered a baby into a high school bathroom toilet. The infant drowned. Acquaintances said the girl, an honors student, was unwilling to tell her parents about her pregnancy for fear of their disapproval.

Any plans to reduce teen pregnancy must focus on parents talking to their children “about sexuality, about relationships, about birth control if they need to,” said Barbara D’Arcy, director of the Placentia Unified School District’s School Age Parenting Program. Four teen mothers, who accompanied D’Arcy to the briefing, told the gathering about the difficulties of teen parenting and the need for early education.

While contraception is covered in most 10th-grade health classes, the sophomore year in high school would have been too late for three of the four girls, D’Arcy said. One young mother recommended that sex education begin in late elementary school.

The agenda was released as the second phase of a program to prevent teen pregnancies and to increase services for teen parents. The six co-sponsoring organizations are the California Alliance Concerned with School Age Parents; the Coalition Concerned with Adolescent Pregnancy; the Junior League of Orange County; Links Inc.; March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation and Mexican American Women’s National Assn.

TEEN PREGNANCY IN CALIFORNIA

Every day, about 385 California youths (ages 11 to 19) discover they are pregnant. Nearly 140 a day deliver a baby.

California has the second highest pregnancy rate in the country. For 15- to 19-year-olds, it is 143 per 1,000, about one-third higher than the national rate of 109 per 1,000.

Half of all teen pregnancies occur within the first six months of having first sexual intercourse.

The teen-age birth rate decreased nationally and in California with the legalization of abortion. About one-third of all abortions in the state are to teen-agers.

One in 10 of California’s pregnant teen-agers did not receive any prenatal medical care or did not begin care until the third trimester. Poorer outcomes for babies, particularly low birth weight, are associated with lack of prenatal care.

The younger the mother, the more likely that her baby will have a low birth weight.

Cost estimates of teen childbearing are high. In 1985, California’s public costs for families in which first births occurred while the woman was a teen-ager were $3.08 billion. The majority of these costs were for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medi-Cal and food stamps.

Source: Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting in California: A Strategic Plan for Action, by C. Brindis and R. Jeremy. University of California, San Francisco, 1988.