When Teen Pregnancy Hits Home : Lifestyle: Politics aside, each family faces tough decisions. Some unite, but others are torn apart in deciding whether to keep the baby.
Maggie is happy. She’s pregnant. She’s 12.
She has decided to keep her child.
It was not an easy decision, she tells a counselor at the clinic, because sometimes she feels like a child herself.
So she asked her girlfriends what to do. “Have the baby,” they urged.
She asked her boyfriend’s advice. “Have the baby,” he commanded.
She asked her mother, knowing what she would say--and she did: “If you are old enough to mess around, you are old enough to have the baby. Go live with him and have his child.”
The girl’s mother “essentially gave this child to the 24-year-old gangbanger who got her pregnant,” says Gayle Wilson Nathanson, founder and director of the Youth and Family Center in Inglewood, where Maggie goes for care.
Maggie wants a good life for her child, Nathanson says. But she has no money, no support system. She can’t begin to understand what’s ahead for her, and all the counseling in the world won’t help her to be a mature parent because she simply is not old enough to comprehend.
Multiply Maggie’s case by the thousands, with changes in the particulars, and you begin to see why many family planning experts sound exasperated by what they consider the unrealistic dogfight over family values in the presidential race.
Whose family values are the candidates talking about, they want to know.
Certainly not the families these specialists see every day. Families in which teen-agers become pregnant in increasing numbers and at ever-younger ages. Families low on the eductional and economic scales, some of whom, they say, view childbearing as one of life’s few attainable achievements.
In some of these families, the parent may be addicted to drugs, as is Maggie’s single mother. But more often, they simply lack the resources or ability to counsel a pregnant child and support her in her decision.
Even in more affluent or in traditional nuclear families, the decision is rarely easy. A pregnant daughter--or a son who faces unexpected fatherhood--presents a complex set of problems.
Should the woman have an abortion, or should she have the child?
If she has the child, should she try to raise it herself? Give it up for adoption? Marry the father or live with him?
The answers, of course, depend on the age and emotions of the couple involved, their religious and cultural backgrounds, their goals for the future. And, to a great extent, on what their parents tell them to do.
Louisa G.
On a sultry day in West Covina, Louisa G. awaits her turn at the East Valley Community Health Center. She looks about 25, has a soft voice and curly brown hair. She is the mother of a 3-month-old baby, she says, and perhaps that is why she looks older than her 15 years.
Louisa does not want her real name used but is eager to tell what her life is like.
“I left my parents’ house at 14 to live with my boyfriend in his parents’ house. I wasn’t pregnant then. He was 18 and about to graduate high school. But I came up pregnant very soon, and we decided to keep the baby. Our parents agreed to help us out.
“I wasn’t scared about having a baby because my mom had so many children, and she taught us how to take care of the little ones as they came along. She had five after me. So I figured I might as well be taking care of one of my own.”
Louisa says her boyfriend works in construction. She attends Pomona High School and, she says, she intends to graduate. The school is one of four in Los Angeles County that have day-care centers for student mothers.
Is she worried she’ll get pregnant again?
Louisa points to her forearm and smiles: “That won’t happen to me. I have Norplant in my arm, to keep me from conceiving.” She got the contraceptive from the clinic after her baby was born, she proudly reports.
Although Louisa says she and her boyfriend could marry with her parents’ permission, her boyfriend is reluctant. “He says if we ever leave each other, we’d have a lot of trouble getting a divorce.” She believes they will marry “eventually.”
Louisa says she “likes the idea” of family values, “but I’m not sure if my family qualifies.”
Tina W.
A freshman at Colorado University who’d had a “full-time boyfriend” for four months, Tina W. was using a diaphragm when she discovered she was pregnant.
At 17, “I decided immediately to have an abortion. I couldn’t even take care of myself. I couldn’t figure out what books I needed, what classes to take, what my major should be. Deciding to have a baby would be roughly the equivalent of deciding to colonize Mars. There was no way.”
Tina could tell neither of her divorced parents. “My mom (a nurse-practitioner) was worried enough about me being away for the first time. I didn’t want to worry her more. And my dad (a surgeon) is so religious and conservative--he’s Muslim--that he would have freaked out and severed our relationship completely. He’d freak out right now if he found out I’m not a virgin.”
Tina, who asked that her real name not be used, borrowed $500 from a friend to pay for an abortion at a private clinic. Afterward, she called her mother and told her what happened and not to worry.
Then Tina started hemorrhaging and needed surgery. She worried that her father’s insurance company would get the bill and he’d find out. So she phoned her mother, who called the hospital and persuaded them to admit Tina without using the insurance. Her mother paid in cash for the surgery and hospital stay.
Looking back now, Tina’s mother says she never really knew if her daughter was sexually active when she left for college. “I gave her the address of Planned Parenthood in West L.A. before she left town, but I realize there’s a big difference between the theory of birth control and the real thing.
“I’m just terribly sorry she had to go through all that suffering. If she had called to ask me what to do, I would almost certainly have insisted on an abortion. If she said she wanted the child, I would ask her how she would support it. Would she drop out of school and take a waitress job?
“I would have laid out her choices pretty brutally. I would not have raised her kids. So I’m glad she had the abortion. I think it saved her life, and she’s a pretty together person now.”
Kathy Eredia has worked with hundreds of pregnant teens through YWCA’s ParenTeen project. She says girls 11 to 13 typically go out on dates with no intention of having sex. They might be virgins--and they often cannot believe that a first sexual encounter will lead to pregnancy. When it does, they cannot decide what to do. Often they wait until their fifth or sixth month, when they have no options left.
Eredia says it’s a myth that pregnant teens don’t want to tell their parents. “Who else would these children want to tell?”
In nine of 10 cases, parents are informed, she says. Daughters usually go to their mothers, who help them tell their fathers.
Although the parents are usually upset and disappointed, the mothers typically offer help. At the YWCA birthing class, for example, many mothers show up to “partner” teen daughters.
Pam Wagner, coordinator of the Student Health Services Project for Los Angeles Unified School District, says another popular myth is that teens drop out of school because of pregnancy. “At least 50% (of teen mothers) drop out prior to becoming pregnant,” she says.
“Teen pregnancy is not a precursor of teen failure,” she says. “It is a symptom, rather than a cause.”
Gilda De La Cruz works mostly with low-income teens at the East Valley Community Health Center. “Each case is unique, but many of these girls get little attention at home, due to financial and other problems. They may be lonely and insecure, and they don’t see very many options ahead for them.
“In school, too, they are not made to feel valued or potentially successful. If their English is poor, for example, or they are not academically strong, they get the message quickly that they are not up to par.”
They get no vocational counseling or optimistic slant on what they can accomplish in life, she says. “And society at large sends the same message: They can’t achieve. So they see being a parent as some kind of accomplishment, regardless of their age. They view success as being a good parent--and, in almost all cases, their motives and intentions are excellent. They want to feel good about themselves. Who wants to feel bad about herself all the time?”
Kathryn Hall, whose Birthing Project in Sacramento mainly serves African-American women, says the public assumes that older teens get pregnant by accident. “The literature shows that’s not true. A recent research project asked that question directly. Most said it was not an accident, that they did not use birth control, that they wanted to have a baby--someone to love who’ll love them back.”
Hall says that more information on birth control or a return to family values--”whatever that means”--will not solve the teen pregnancy problem. “They will continue to get pregnant,” she says, because “they see a baby as the solution to their problems.”
Of teens who do want abortions, Hall says, many have parents who won’t permit it. “In working-class and religious homes, the moms say, ‘We don’t have abortions in this family.’ Having the baby is almost like a punishment,” Hall says. She witnessed one birth at which the family refused to let the teen have any medication. “They wanted her to suffer and see what it really felt like.”
There are as many scenarios as there are pregnant teens, says Dr. Ezra Davidson, professor and chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and the King-Drew Medical Center. “The reality (of what happens) varies according to age, social and economic status, the intensity of religious beliefs and the cultural overlay.”
Says Nathanson of the Inglewood youth center: “The idealized families that the candidates talk about bear no relationship to the families we see at our center.”
“Neither candidate seems to have a clue as to what’s going on in America, not a clue about the values of families who have been left behind.” For most of her clients, Nathanson says, “the family values debate has no relevance whatsoever.”
