Having the First Baby Doesn’t Stop the Cycle

Common sense might dictate that once a teen-ager has a baby, she would do anything in her power to avoid having another child until much later.

But common sense is a rare commodity in the puzzling world of adolescent parenting. Indeed, 25% of teen mothers have a second or third child during adolescence, according to California and national statistics. The younger the girl, the more likely she is to have two, three or four children by the time she is 20.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 30% of teens who give birth before age 16 have a second child within two years.

And the more children, the more likely the teen-ager will be trapped in a lifetime of poverty. A teen with two children is much more likely than even a teen with one child to drop out of school and go on welfare, says Kim Connor of the state Senate Office of Research.

“It’s the second and subsequent births that really put them over the edge,” Connor says.

And if that’s not enough bad news, several expensive and ambitious efforts to stem the rate of rapid, repeat teen pregnancies in communities around the nation have failed big time, leaving policy makers and health officials baffled.

“You can understand the first baby--maybe a teen-ager doesn’t know how difficult it is to raise a kid. But the second?” asks Rep. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), the author of a large-scale teen pregnancy prevention package that would educate the public about the negative consequences of teen pregnancy.

Does another child add more meaning to their lives? Are teens poor at family planning? Or, offers Lockyer: “Maybe they live in a world that is just so immediate and impulsive.”

That impulsiveness, especially prevalent in the lives of teen-agers who have little in the way of bright future plans, may be the primary reason additional pregnancies occur, says Rebecca Maynard, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maynard’s study on repeat pregnancy published last fall stunned health officials with its dismal conclusions. Launched in 1986, 6,000 first-time teen-age mothers in three U.S. cities (Chicago, Newark and Camden, N.J.) were divided into two groups. Half of the teens were enrolled in a program of “enhanced services” designed to prevent a second pregnancy; they received extensive education about contraceptives and were given the contraceptive of their choice free. In addition, they were provided transportation to their doctors’ visits and received free child care.

The other group of teens received none of these services.

Thirty months later, two-thirds of the targeted teen-agers had given birth or were pregnant again--the same number as the adolescents who received no services.

“We did what we thought were all the right things to prevent repeat pregnancy and it made no difference,” Maynard says. “Our notion was that the issues were knowledge and access. And what we found was the issues go way beyond that.”

Although research shows that the majority of the young mothers definitely did not want more children, they were terrible contraceptive users--perhaps because they are kids themselves, Maynard says.

“People forget that adolescents, regardless of income or social class, are risk takers. They are impulsive. They feel invincible and they fail to plan ahead. So they don’t think, ‘Oh, gee, we might have sex tonight. Are we prepared?’ If they get a headache, they blame it on the Pill and stop taking it. But then they don’t take the next step, which is not to have sex. Or they’ll hook up with a guy and he won’t believe in contraception and she’ll think, ‘This one time won’t hurt.’

“There are almost as many explanations as kids getting pregnant,” she adds.

Victoria Huey, 18, had her first baby at 13. At 16, she became pregnant again.

“It was a one-night thing. I had a condom. It was right here,” she grins, patting the pocket of her jeans.

Her daughter is now 2 and lives with her; her son is in the care of an aunt. Victoria goes for Depo-Provera shots--a newer contraceptive consisting of injections of a potent, long-lasting hormone--every three months.

Maynard notes that her study took place before Depo-Provera and the surgically implanted contraceptive Norplant were available. But she doubts that these newer methods are having much impact. Many teens distrust Norplant, and Depo-Provera requires a shot every three months, a regimen adolescents are unlikely to adhere to on their own.

“We have a long way to go,” Maynard says. “We need to improve the contraceptive technology more than we have. We also need different public attitudes about [teen pregnancy]. It’s not OK, and we haven’t been clear about that.”