Family Planners See Optimistic Signs

As hopeless as the resurgence of teen-age pregnancy sounds, family planners are more optimistic about the future than they have been in years.

“People don’t have to feel hopeless,” says Stacy Banks, district director of El Nido Services, a private, nonprofit agency based in South-Central Los Angeles. “All of these kids have dreams--every single one of them--and it’s amazing what happens when someone enters their lives who listens to them without judging them, who’s consistent, honest and open.”

Around Los Angeles County, more teen mothers are getting high school diplomas. Bright, savvy teen-agers are going as peer counselors into some high schools, where their first message is, hey, it’s OK to be a virgin. Their second message: If you’re not, you better know how contraceptives work.

On a national level, family planners are cautiously hoping that national debate is shifting away from costly, divisive fights over abortion and toward shaping educational programs that can help prevent the need for abortions in the first place. In Europe, for example, open-minded sex education has kept teen pregnancy low even though teen-agers have long been sexually active.

At the outset of the American birth control revolution 30 years ago, many white, college-educated family planners now admit, they naively--and wrongly--figured all they had to do was make contraceptives available and teen pregnancy would be a thing of the past.

Today, more people of color are shaping local programs and national policy. And more women in communities of color are stepping forward in the name of making life better for their daughters.

“Women feel anger inside--they’re seeing their children get lost and killed, and they want to do something about it,” said Leticia Quezada, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education. “If you can put that anger together with resources, they will do something about it.”

A big reason for the guarded optimism is the Clinton Administration.

“I feel like I’m preaching to the choir when talking about the need for family planning services and the need to address teen pregnancy,” says Deborah Horan, director of government relations for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. “This Administration realizes that you’ve got to teach abstinence, but you also have to deal with those kids who will not abstain.”

Still, over the past decade more than 1,000 family planning clinics have closed as a result of drastic funding cutbacks. Today, if a bill in Congress passes, those budgets will increase dramatically. But the overall budget would still be $50 million short in terms of dollars adjusted for inflation from 1980 levels, Horan says.

In 1989, she says, the estimated cost to maintain families begun by teen-agers nationwide was $212 billion. According to the New York-based Alan Guttmacher Institute, for every $1 spent on family planning care, California taxpayers save an estimated $12 in welfare and other costs.

For the first time, family planners are focusing on the ethnic diversity of today’s teen-agers. “Celebrating Diversity and Innovation” was the title of last month’s national family planning conference.

“Somehow, you just have to be sensitive to where other women are,” says Catherine Wiley, program director for the JWCH centers for women in South Los Angeles. “It is not our role to change cultural structures. Changes happen gradually, over generations.”

Jane Delgado, president of the National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Service Organizations, says Latinas prefer to speak of “child spacing” rather than family planning.

“In Mexico, the government has put up billboards telling men about vasectomies . . . and told young men about condoms on matchbooks that say ‘Yo no juego con fuego’ (‘I don’t play with fire’),” Delgado says.

As a result of such programs, Mexico’s birthrate has dropped from one of the world’s highest to a level that, in Mexico City at least, is not much higher than Los Angeles County’s.

“Here,” says Delgado, “we have a hard time even talking about condoms. . . . As a country, we’ve made a decision not to be involved.”