‘I Wanted Somebody to Love’ : L.A. County’s teen birthrate is soaring above the national average. Growing numbers of girls, some as young as 13, say they are having babies because their own childhoods--and hopes for the futre--are so bleak.

When classes started at San Fernando High School this year, 180babies were on the waiting list for the school’s infant day-care program--many born to incoming students.

In the shadow of Magic Mountain, a Valencia-Newhall teacher gave up tutoring child stars and Olympic ice skaters to tutor a new wave of teen mothers.

Downtown, the first Korean-American teen clinic in the United States opened after a survey showed 90% of Korean-American teen-agers knew another Korean-American teen who was pregnant.

In Antelope Valley, a worried school board began instituting classes for pregnant teens at five high schools.

In crowded Central slums, across vast smog-belt housing tracts and in pastel-stucco suburbs, Los Angeles County teen-agers are having more babies than in any other metropolitan area in the nation--24,000 in 1990 alone.

While parents argue over condom distribution in high schools, hundreds of girls--and it is still primarily girls, not boys, whose lives are disrupted--are starting families each year in junior high, even elementary school.

In Los Angeles County, recession, immigration and gang culture have helped send the birthrate among 15- to 17-year-old girls soaring to 40% above the national average. Now, California’s teen birthrate is not only the highest in the nation but also the fastest-growing, according to the Center for Reproductive Health Policy at UC San Francisco.

But as startling as the statistics are, perhaps the most stunning development is one still so new that it has yet to be measured. No longer can teen births be written off as the result of “unintended pregnancies”: Increasing numbers of girls, some as young as 13, say they are having babies because they want to.

“If anyone had told me 20 years ago that we would be at this point today, I would have said it was not possible-- not possible, “ says Gayle Wilson Nathanson, executive director of the Youth and Family Center of Inglewood, who works with teens who are pregnant and who have had their babies.

“As adults we are horrified, but to children, their behavior is logical. If you think your boyfriend won’t live till he’s 19, if you can’t go to college, having a baby at 16 makes sense. . . . After all, why remain a child? What have we done to make childhood a joy today? What is there to wait for?”

It is no coincidence, child advocates say, that neighborhoods hit hard by the riots last year also have some of the county’s highest incidents of teen births. Some of the same emotions that fueled that unrest--frustration, poverty, ignorance, hopelessness--also are driving the increase in adolescent pregnancy, they say.

“Young people are having babies now essentially to empower themselves,” says Catherine Wiley, longtime family planning program director for the four county comprehensive health centers in South Los Angeles. “If you lack self-esteem, you will look to other things to empower you, whether that’s burning down a building or making a baby.”

A three-month study by The Times indicates:

* While many other cities have higher teen birthrates than Los Angeles, the rate here is growing fast, particularly among the very young. A total of 514 girls age 14 and under had babies in Los Angeles County in 1990, up 55% from four years earlier. Such births are often linked, directly or indirectly, to incest or molestation. Another 9,000 girls aged 15 to 17 also gave birth.

* Teen births are increasing in all ethnic groups as teen-agers become sexually active earlier. But in a trend causing growing concern in established Latino neighborhoods, Latinas make up 70% of all new teen mothers, although they make up only about half of teen-age girls in the county. Some, but far from all, are immigrants who, ironically, may be bearing children even younger here than at home because motherhood offers a familiar role in an alien world.

* Childbearing is rising among gang members who talk of wanting to “leave something behind” in case they die young. One counselor opens all group discussions with teen mothers by asking how many funerals they have attended.

* Only 28% of the males who get teen-agers pregnant are themselves teens, while nearly half are aged 20 to 24. While the vast majority of even the youngest pregnant teens say their relationships are voluntary, health-care givers often worry that they may have been coerced.

* Exacerbating the birth increase is the “biosocial gap,” a little-understood phenomenon that causes girls to enter puberty at a much younger age today than in the 19th Century, for example. Now, the onset of puberty commonly occurs about age 12 or 13, compared to 16 a century ago.

* The dramatic increase in births is fraught with consequences for educators, taxpayers and two generations of children who will grow up almost as one. For example, California will need more than 2,500 kindergarten classrooms in 1995 just to accommodate children born to teen mothers in 1990, the state Department of Health Services reports. Families started by teen parents are more likely to live in poverty and less likely to achieve educational and job goals.

* Many educators say plain-spoken--and ethnically sensitive--sex and family classes are desperately needed, starting early in elementary school.

From one part of Los Angeles to another, teen birthrates vary dramatically. For example, fewer than 1 in 100 unmarried teen-age girls had babies in one prosperous coastal neighborhood in 1989, while in a poor neighborhood just a half-hour’s drive away, nearly 1 in 5 gave birth.

Indeed, in some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods, sex and childbirth may be replacing traditional rites of passage. In some areas, the coming-out events for 15-year-old Latinas, quinceaneras, are on the wane because parents can’t afford them. Senior proms are so expensive that some kids sometimes just spend the night together instead. And in an area with one of the highest teen birthrates in the state, South-Central Los Angeles, a driver’s license at 16 is unlikely because a third of the residents have no cars.

For Jillia Tucker, a 15-year-old African-American resident of that area, the passage out of childhood began in seventh grade.

Jillia, a sophomore at Locke High School, had thought about having a child when she was 16. Not realizing she could get pregnant “the first time,” she conceived shortly after her 13th birthday. In the end, she decided to keep her baby because she figured 13 was a good age to begin motherhood.

“I always wanted to grow up with my kids,” she says, echoing a refrain repeated by teen parents everywhere. “I don’t want them around when I’m 29 and I can’t communicate.”

*

Somehow, pregnancy looks different on kids young enough to be selling Girl Scout cookies:

Nervous young girls with plucked brows and black eyeliner sitting outside vice principals’ offices, weighing the dangers of positing their trust in authority. Skinny eighth-graders trying to stave off the inevitable behind denial and winter coats. Expectant mothers in their third trimester taking brisk walks on playgrounds where softball once was played.

“Many of these girls come from very dysfunctional families,” says Diane Chamberlain, associate director of the Valley Community Clinic in North Hollywood. “Their mothers are divorced, alcoholics--failures in their daughters’ eyes. Or their parents are so stressed out working two jobs that they lash out when a kid dares to ask for $5 for a movie. . . . There’s this constant chain of pressure, and the kids just can’t take it.”

A decade ago, Chamberlain says, the clinic served healthy young women who simply lacked insurance. Now, 13-year-old patients aren’t uncommon, nor are second-stage gonorrhea and abnormal Pap smears in schoolgirls. One 15-year-old recently requested infertility tests--if she didn’t get pregnant soon, she said, her boyfriend was going to leave her.

“Do you want to be pregnant?” Chamberlain asked another girl.

The girl shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied.

“What about your boyfriend?” Chamberlain pressed. “Does he want a child?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to him,” the girl said. “He already has three.”

The conversation made Chamberlain realize that a painful sort of adolescent ennui is replacing the shock or tears she used to see on the faces of girls who had just found out they were pregnant.

“Here we are, trying to explain how much of an impact having a baby will have on their lives, how it will prevent these girls from graduating from high school and getting a good job,” she says.

“And they’re saying, ‘So what? I’m never going to get any of those things anyway.’ . . . I don’t know how to explain this, but what I see is that fundamentally it is taking everything these teen-agers have just to live. There seems to be no place they can find joy or fun.”

For many such girls, experts say, the instinct to become pregnant may actually be a healthy one--a desperate and lurching, if short-sighted, attempt to set things right. To create a new, healthy family from an old, damaged one.

To manufacture love.

“Sometimes the only positive thing girls can turn to, and not always consciously, is a child,” says Dr. Claire Brindis, co-director of the Center for Reproductive Health Policy at UC San Francisco. “How many times do you hear people say that children are the hope of the future? If you really feel you have no hope, then why not create it?”

One young girl who had never known her father, who had watched her mother come home exhausted every night from cleaning houses an hour’s bus ride away, who had seen young boys taken away bloodied in ambulances, says she realized after the fact that she got pregnant because she was lonely.

“I did it because I wanted somebody to love,” she declares in the voice of someone who has been asked the same question too many times. “Why is that so hard to understand?”

*

Birthrates are rising among all ethnic groups as younger teen-agers become sexually active.

But Anglo teen-agers are significantly more likely than others to use contraceptives. One federal study published last year found that 81% of sexually active Anglo girls used birth control, compared to about 71% of African-American girls and 62% of Latinas. (Figures for Asian-Americans were unavailable.)

“Family planning is very important with middle-class white kids,” says Sharon Watson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council.

“But when you get into poverty, which is highly correlated with black and Latina girls, it’s different. There’s little sense of self-worth. Which girls are told they’re worth more by society? White girls or black girls? White girls or Latina girls?”

And for all girls, there is an added problem, notes David Flores, director of the division of the alternative education for the county. Says Flores: “My honest belief is that this (teen births) is a matter of gender discrimination: Boys get all of the attention by society, and girls get the blame.”

As for the sexual revolution, interviews at Los Angeles public schools suggest it hits as early as the seventh or eighth grade, when the choice for girls is between feeling guilty if you sleep with your boyfriend and selfish if you don’t.

“He was the first boy who was really nice to me, and I didn’t want him to think I was the sort of girl who didn’t appreciate it,” says one Anglo girl who had just received what she called “mixed” news that she wasn’t pregnant at 16.

A 1988 survey of the nation’s high school students by the national Centers for Disease Control showed that the median age of first intercourse for students was 16.1 years for boys and 16.9 for girls. But in interviews, most girls and boys say they and many of their friends began younger.

“Life is short--play hard,” quips an Anglo Valley girl, quoting a Reebok ad, when asked why so many kids she knows were sexually active in junior high.

Thirty miles to the south, another girl expecting a baby at 16 responds to the same question with a comment about another athletic shoe ad. Teen-agers at her school, she says, are personalizing Nike T-shirts to read: “Just Do It--To Me.”

*

“Hope is the best contraceptive,” Marian Wright Edelman, the African-American founder of the powerful advocacy group Children’s Defense Fund, declared in Watts last May, shortly after the riots ended.

For family planners, that phrase has become a theme. But Edelman never said hope was the only contraceptive.

A nationwide RAND Corp. study confirmed that, for African-American youths in particular, the hope of going to college prompted contraceptive use in high school. Yet even teen-agers with guaranteed higher educations are getting pregnant.

More than 500 poor African-American and Latino kids in Los Angeles participate in the I Have a Dream Foundation, a program in which wealthy donors promise a state university or vocational-school education to inner-city students who get high school diplomas.

But soon after the program began in South-Central Los Angeles, one eighth-grade Latina--a state-certified gifted student--became pregnant. Then a young African-American got pregnant too. Over the next three years, 25 girls in the program found they were expecting.

“It broke my heart,” says Myrtle Middleton, executive director of the foundation. “There was nothing about teen pregnancy in the I Have a Dream booklet.”

Middleton set out to see for herself what had gone wrong.

She visited the housing projects just south of downtown where most of the kids lived. There, she met 14-year-olds who had never had a birthday party and 12-year-olds who had never crossed Central Avenue. Some girls never had a mother take them by the hand to a local drugstore to buy medicine, let alone anyone who had talked to them about birth control. Their mothers, in turn, knew little about the subject.

Clearly, birth control was simply not part of the culture in the girls’ neighborhood. The area ranks among the highest in teen births in the state every year, but it didn’t have a single teen clinic of the sort that dots the coast and parts of the San Fernando Valley.

Virtually all the girls in the projects, including many top students, were having sex--sometimes with boys they didn’t even care much about.

Why? Middleton asked.

“Because everyone does it,” the girls would answer.

“No, everyone doesn’t,” she would tell them.

But everyone they knew did, and no one they knew had gone to college.

Hope, Middleton concluded, is not enough.

“Of all the things I’ve ever come in contact with, teen pregnancy is the most difficult to understand,” Middleton says now.

And she adds: “Trust me on this: If you have high expectations for children, they will rise to them. If you do not, they will not. I believe that with every bone in my body.”

Monday: In Part II, conservative Latino families try to cope with the impact of teen births.

Staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.