For Some, Pregnancy Offers an Exit From a Dreary Life : Future: Teen-age mothers have become the prime target of welfare reformers. The story of one 17-year-old, whose life echoes thousands of others, shows how tangled the problem is.

She’s an unemployed, unwed mother at 17, but Dawn Kowalski feels blessed when she cradles baby Justin--a warm bundle of tomorrow dozing in her arms.

Before the baby came along, Dawn had no future to hold onto.

Stroking his fine, sandy hair, she describes her former self: a school dropout from a troubled home, with no job and no plans, feeling trapped in rural West Virginia. She wasted her days at the mall, partied all night.

“I didn’t care what happened to me,” she said softly.

Now her world is a small apartment dotted with diapers and parenting magazines, the rent paid by a federal housing subsidy. She lives alone with 10-week-old Justin, nursing him, sleeping when he sleeps, listening to country music because MTV makes him wail.

Dawn may be an accidental mother, but she takes pride in being a good one. “This has made me a better person,” she said recently. “It’s really straightened my life out.”

It’s an odd perspective. After all, teen-age pregnancy is an avoidable hardship that robs many girls of their prospects and can doom their children to poverty.

But life unfolds haphazardly for girls like Dawn, and cause and effect aren’t always clear.

Some believe making a baby is making a future. And to them, even a shaky future may seem better than none at all.

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More than 1 million teen-agers will get pregnant this year; about a third of them will be age 17 or younger.

Teen-agers will give birth to a half-million babies--70% born out of wedlock.

Compared with other teen-age girls, teen mothers are less likely to finish their education, less likely to earn a decent wage, and more likely to spend years on welfare. Families headed by current or former teen mothers receive $34 billion a year in government health and welfare benefits.

Americans worried as the teen pregnancy rate climbed over the past two decades, reflecting an increase in the number of teens having sex.

It could be worse, however. Teens who have sex today use birth control more effectively than sexually active teens of the past.

Abortion also has kept the teen birth rate down: more than a third of pregnant teens decide to abort.

Middle-class teens have become so successful at avoiding birth that teen mothers are now widely perceived to be poor, black girls living in the inner cities. But many rural areas also have high teen birth rates, and there are more than twice as many white teen-age mothers as black ones.

The common denominator is disadvantage: 83% of teens who have babies are from poor or low-income families, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a not-for-profit research group.

These girls are only slightly more likely than middle-class teens to have sex. They are significantly more likely to get pregnant, however, and much less likely to have an abortion, Guttmacher found.

Births to single mothers are rising across society, but illegitimate babies are still more common among poor girls. Giving up a child for adoption is rare.

Poverty overlaps with all sorts of other factors: black and Hispanic girls get pregnant at twice the rate of whites; studies show girls raised by a single parent are more likely to have babies; so are the daughters of teen mothers; girls who have been sexually abused; girls who are doing poorly in school or have dropped out; and girls who drink or use drugs.

Many teen-agers don’t see a baby as their biggest handicap.

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As a child, Dawn made A’s in school and dreamed of being a lawyer. A favorite fifth-grade teacher joked that her “big mouth” would make her a good one. Dawn and her stepsister practiced arguing cases for fun.

But life at home was chaotic. Dawn’s parents were always fighting; money was always short. Her father drank heavily and was often out of work. Dawn’s mother says he beat her and hit the two girls.

Whenever he grew too abusive, “Mom would just pack us off to the women’s shelter,” said Dawn’s stepsister, Tina Fleming, now 20. “We lived in the shelter off and on.”

Things got worse when Dawn’s parents separated, then divorced when she was 11. For years Dawn was bounced back and forth between her father, whom she feared, and her mother, who was often broke and soon in another turbulent marriage.

“My life fell apart,” Dawn said. “I just gave up. I didn’t bother with school anymore. I quit caring.”

Fleming moved in with a girlfriend and finished high school. Dawn could have graduated, too, Fleming says, but she had changed.

By then Dawn was routinely skipping school, staying out late, drinking at parties. She tried sex for the first time at age 15, Dawn said, because “everybody was talking about it.”

Soon after she turned 16, Dawn quit school. A few months later, she was pregnant.

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Teen mothers have become a favorite target of welfare reformers in both political parties--they say the current system rewards teens for having illegitimate babies.

Girls like Dawn get welfare checks and other aid that lets them set up their own households and feel like instant adults, even if they are barely scraping by.

Next year, Congress will consider proposals to cut off aid to young mothers or make them work for their welfare checks.

University of Pennsylvania sociology Professor Elijah Anderson, who studies life in the inner city, confirms that some girls intentionally get pregnant for “the check.”

But they aren’t the majority of teen mothers he knows.

More often, he said, girls who grow up surrounded by crime and drugs and single moms and out-of-work dads--girls who dream of marriage and a career but don’t realistically expect them--seem to stumble into pregnancy.

Some boys reared in this culture make a sport of getting girls pregnant to prove their manhood, Anderson wrote in his book, “Street Wise.”

“So many of the young people lack a sense of future,” Anderson said. “I think that plays into this willingness to engage in sex and to be careless about sexual behavior, to not think about it so much.”

The girls don’t plan a life on welfare; they don’t plan much of anything. But a baby has a dreamy sort of appeal.

It’s a familiar story at the Shenandoah Maternity Center, where Dawn and other girls from West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, most of them white and low-income, come for care.

Some girls are dismayed to be pregnant. The staff suspects others planned it to have something to love or in hopes of holding onto a boyfriend.

“But the largest group is those who are just ambivalent--who didn’t plan it, but don’t mind that they are pregnant,” said center director Cindy Barr. “And they are the ones no one seems to talk about.”

Neither sermons on abstinence nor lessons in birth control have gotten through to this group.

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Dawn learned in school about preventing pregnancy and AIDS. She believed in using condoms.

But for a time, shortly after she turned 16, Dawn tried to get pregnant. She and her steady boyfriend, David, a 24-year-old who already has a child by another woman, had unprotected sex for two months.

“We had everything planned out, we were going to get married, have a family,” she said. But when she thought she might be pregnant, they got scared. They split up soon after the false alarm.

It was the next man she dated, a relationship that lasted just three months, who fathered her child. They didn’t bother with birth control. Dawn insists she didn’t want to get pregnant, and says she suspected she was infertile.

“I thought, that’s not going to happen to me,” Dawn said. “And then it happened a month later.”

By the time she tested positive, Dawn had already broken up with the baby’s father, a 25-year-old electronics store manager. He pressed for an abortion, but she refused. She never considered adoption.

Dawn wanted the baby.

“At first I was scared, but when I sat down and thought about it, it was wonderful,” she said, a smile lighting up her brown eyes. “I was excited.”

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Sex education is based largely on the notion that teens won’t have babies if they know where to get contraceptives and how to use them. After all, several surveys have found more than 90% of unmarried, pregnant teen-agers say they didn’t want to get pregnant.

Yet teens who know about birth control keep having babies. And sometimes a second or third.

To explore this contradiction, Laurie S. Zabin, a Johns Hopkins University professor of population issues, led a survey of 313 black teen-agers who came to an inner city Baltimore clinic for pregnancy tests.

When asked whether they wanted to be pregnant, 91% said no. But in answer to other questions--How would you feel if you were pregnant? Would having a baby now be a problem for you?--about half of them expressed ambivalence about having a baby.

At the end of two years, the ambivalent girls were just as likely to have a baby as the handful of girls who said they wanted to get pregnant. Two-thirds of each group gave birth.

The girls who unequivocally wanted to avoid pregnancy did better: just over one-third of them had a baby.

If teens had to take a pill every day or use condoms faithfully to get pregnant, Zabin suggests, few would do so. But for sexually active teens (about half of all girls ages 15 to 19), avoiding pregnancy takes planning and, therefore, motivation.

For many girls, especially among the middle class, the motivation is the promise of an education, a career and marriage--things worth waiting for. Family, church, friends and teachers help reinforce these goals.

“That’s what brings young people to family planning services,” said Barbara Huberman, who leads North Carolina’s efforts to curtail teen pregnancy. “They have a reason: I don’t want to be a parent, I’m going to college, I want to get out of this little town, I want to go somewhere.”

Those who expect less from life see less harm in getting pregnant.

In fact, a baby sometimes inspires these girls to improve their lot, often with the aid of programs designed to help teen mothers finish high school, get job training or go to college.

But many will never build a stable home for their children.

Across the country, a few community programs are trying to motivate poor girls--and teen-age boys--before they become parents. Most take a whole-life approach that emphasizes education and career goals and discourages drinking, drugs and premarital sex (while promoting birth control for the sexually active).

But even those who run such teen centers say there is no cure for the cycle of entrenched poverty and broken families that produces aimless teens.

“All the money you can spend is just a Band-Aid,” said Imogene Peterson, family services director of The Family Place in Baltimore. “Jobs and futures are what our young people need.”

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Six weeks after her baby was born, Dawn returned to the maternity clinic for one of the more foolproof birth control methods--Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injection that lasts three months.

She is dating David again, and hopes they will be married next summer.

She also is studying for the high school equivalency test and plans to enter a computer training program, so she can support Justin alone if she has to.

“I want to be somebody for him,” Dawn said as her baby slept beside her on the sofa.