The Crying Game : Teen-Age Girls Find Lifelike Dolls Bring Lifelike Responsibilities

At South Gate High, teen-agers are lining up to have babies.

Students in a teen-age pregnancy prevention program--the only one of its kind in Los Angeles County--spend several days lugging around frighteningly lifelike baby dolls that wail at unpredictable intervals. The $220, computer-controlled “baby” with a recording of a newborn’s cries cannot be quieted unless properly cuddled and “fed” by inserting a key into its monitoring device.

Yellow, red and green alarms light up on the doll’s back if the teen-ager neglects or mishandles it. It usually takes 10 to 30 minutes to calm one of the five babies, a task some students undertake amid glares from classmates--and from boyfriends and relatives.

“This experiment made me not want to have a baby, until at least after high school,” said Renee Sierras, 15, cuddling the 10-pound, battery-packed doll she named Damien. “I’m not going to have sex until I’m married.”

It was the same for Luane Martinez. One morning a groggy Martinez, 15, tried to “feed” her doll as it shrieked in the early morning, waking everyone in the house while she fumbled in the dark to find the keyhole on the doll’s back. “My older brother said he was going to kill the baby if I didn’t bring it back to school,” she said.

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Jeannette Leyva, 17, took her baby to church choir practice and it started crying while she was singing. Unable to quiet it, she finally had to leave. “That was a doll,” she said. “Imagine a real baby.”

That is precisely the notion counselors have in mind when they send students to the pregnancy prevention program who are considered at risk of becoming pregnant.

Several schools nationwide have used the anatomically correct Baby Think It Over dolls, manufactured by a San Diego company, since they appeared on the market last year. A handful of schools in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties have ordered them.

Schools are turning to the computerized dolls at a time when teen-age pregnancy has become one of the most emotional elements in the national debate over growing federal welfare payments. About 90% of welfare money goes to fatherless families that most often started with unwed teen-age mothers. A state report last month said 15% of all California girls between 15 and 19 became pregnant in 1993, the latest year for which data was available. It also found that Latina teen-agers accounted for 60% of the 70,000 statewide births to teen-age mothers that year.

These issues resonate strongly at South Gate High, where Latinos make up the majority of the 3,500 students.

One out of every 10 girls gets pregnant each year at South Gate, “which is why something needed to be done,” said Sherry Ward, who heads the school’s teen-age pregnancy prevention program.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials, who recently began compiling teen-age pregnancy statistics, say there are about 10,000 teen-age pregnancies a year in the 650,000-student district, with about half the mothers giving birth.

Ward said researchers believe that a high rate of teen-age pregnancy among Latinos could be attributed to a strict culture in which conversations about sex are often considered taboo. Research also indicates that two-thirds or more of teen-agers who become pregnant have previously been victims of sexual abuse.

Into these abstractions enters a screaming machine intended to make girls and their boyfriends take stock of what a baby really does. It’s a world of difference from South Gate High’s previous cautionary program, in which students carried a chicken egg for a week to simulate baby care.

The girls say passersby do double-takes before they realize that the squishy face, half-opened glossy eyes and tiny wrinkly hands and feet are those of a vinyl-skinned doll. Its nerve-rattling cry makes the doll seem even more lifelike.

The dolls come in different races. South Gate has two Latino boys and two girls, a white girl and an African American boy on the way. The school does not have another model the manufacturer created: a “crack baby” whose crying is more frequent and accompanied by tremors.

Despite the details, some of the school’s at-risk teen-agers who have cared for the dolls were not turned off by the experience.

Evelia Escobedo, a freshman, said the exercise was just a practice shot for her plans to have a child.

“My boyfriend and I are going to have a baby in October,” said Escobedo, 15. “I know it’s going to be hard having and taking care of a baby, but that’s OK. I always wanted to have a baby.”

“I don’t think the doll is a panacea,” said Mary Jurmain, president of the San Diego-based Baby Think It Over Co. “It needs to be used with a good program. Kids need to hear about the pros and cons about having babies and need to understand other responsibilities. Baby Think It Over does have its limitations.”

Barbara Hillman, a home economics teacher at San Diego’s Madison High, where the doll was first used about a year ago, said the doll does change teen-agers’ attitudes--at least for a few months.

“Even if it’s a period of three to four months that a girl changes her outlook on having a baby, it’s a positive thing,” Hillman said. “Then you work with them again.”