State Faces Tough Battle Against Teen Pregnancy

Given her life, it’s hard to imagine Michelle is one of the lucky few. She grew up in a part of Los Angeles where dreams about the future are lost to the struggle of surviving each day’s dangers and temptations.

Her father was absent from her life, and her mother, she said, left much of the parenting to her. At too early an age, Michelle said, she took that role for herself and her two brothers. But by 16, she was on probation and pregnant, starting on a course to repeat the same life for another generation.

“I feel like I’m 35 years old, I’ve seen so much,” she said recently while her daughter napped. “You’re like 16, having a child--you can’t work, you can’t do anything. . . . I never had a family. I didn’t have anywhere to go. . . . I would be on the streets and on welfare.”

Instead, Michelle is among the lucky few whose plunge into crisis was caught by one of the strands in America’s fraying social safety net. As a result, today she is a college freshman and one of the heartwarming success stories at St. Anne’s Maternity Home near downtown Los Angeles.

Earlier this month, Gov. Pete Wilson identified stories such as this one and thousands more like it every year in California as one of the highest priorities for state government.

His announcement signaled a realignment of the state’s focus, turning from an economy that is gaining steam to teen pregnancy--a social problem considered so dangerous that it threatens every facet of life in California, from schools and police departments to the resources available for environmental and transportation departments.

With strong agreement from top Democrats, the state is preparing its largest effort ever to address the issue.

“This is the most basic, fundamental social problem of our day,” said Senate leader Bill Lockyer of Hayward, the Legislature’s ranking Democrat. “We have got to change that behavior.”

Lockyer said he was alarmed that California spends up to $7 billion each year just on welfare to families that began with teenage mothers. But in his recent State of the State address, Wilson also warned that the more than 70,000 births to teens each year in California create an enormous burden for a variety of public safety, education and social service systems as well as a perceptible degradation in the state’s quality of life.

“The consequences for them, and for us, are devastating,” Wilson said in his speech. “But when we succeed . . . we can build fewer prisons and more college libraries.”

Teen births in California have increased about 20% since 1987, although they have declined slightly in the last two years, as have births overall. Still, California claims the nation’s highest rate of teen pregnancy at 154 births per 1,000.

So far, government programs for teenage pregnancy have been characterized by fits and starts, creating a patchwork of programs that often tangle multiple layers of government bureaucracy and regulations to obtain financing. Universally, one of the biggest complaints from social workers is the need for coordinated efforts.

First, however, lawmakers say they expect a vigorous discussion--fraught with political flash fires about abortion, sex education and contraception--about the limits and abilities of government to influence behavior on a profound level.

How can Sacramento spend its money, lawmakers are wondering, in a way that will reach a disadvantaged 14-year-old girl and give her the courage to resist substantial social pressures to participate in early sex and parenthood? Also, as state officials recently learned, much depends on the quality of efforts to reach at-risk youth who are skeptical of authority.

After allocating $25 million in five years, Wilson last month closed a statewide anti-pregnancy program for teens when an evaluation found that it was not working. Basically, officials concluded that the focus on teaching abstinence was lost on students who felt that the lessons did not recognize what their lives are like.

The mistake is often made, social workers say, by picking the wrong place to start a prevention program. Before teenagers can be expected to practice values that require personal courage, most have to be treated first for severe low self-esteem and feelings of abandonment, they said.

At St. Anne’s, where privately funded housing, day care and counseling is provided for up to three years to 60 teenage mothers at a time, vice president Carol Lee Thorpe said many teenage girls idealize sex and sometimes motherhood as opportunities for loving relationships that they have never known.

“There is a desperate need to be loved,” she said. “They have gone without parental nurturing. They may have been abused by their mothers, but they love their mothers. And they know their child is going to love them.”

Eighteen-year-old Stacey from the San Gabriel Valley is among those clinging to the hope that her troubled relationship with her mother has now healed. She said her problems became so bad about a year ago that she was removed from her home by a court. Three months ago, while living at St. Anne’s, she gave birth to a daughter.

“My mom treated me like a slave,” she said recently as she stroked her daughter to sleep on her lap. “Now she looks at me like a daughter. This [baby] brought me a lot closer to my mom.”

A recent study by the California Department of Health and Human Services found that two-thirds of the state’s teenage mothers were victims of child abuse. What’s more, nearly a quarter said they had been raped. Among those victims, the average age of the first attack was 12, and it was committed by an assailant--sometimes a friend or family member--who was 22.

“There is a very strong link between child abuse and teen pregnancy,” said Terry Anderson, a legislative aide to Lockyer. “So to address teen pregnancy, you have to address child abuse.”

In their search for solutions, officials expect to pay special attention to the state’s Latino community, which accounted for about 60% of the 70,000 teen births in 1993. About 23% of the mothers were white, and 11% were black.

They also have placed a high priority on targeting men who impregnate teenagers, a group that has not received much government attention in the past. Officials are alarmed that most of the fathers--56% statewide--are over the age of 20; the average age is 23.

At St. Anne’s, Thorpe said, officials speculate that older men seek younger partners to avoid the risk of disease. She also said some fathers refer to the child care center as “the trophy room.”

In San Mateo County, Cheryl Parker, director of the state’s only federally financed project for teen pregnancy, said some fathers have been found responsible for seven or eight babies with different teenage mothers.

Parker said the county’s pregnancy prevention program hopes to reach young males and convey a seemingly obvious concept that “there is a real live being when there is a pregnancy. Part of it is,” she said, “when you don’t have a relationship with that child, it doesn’t exist.”

Wilson has addressed the fathers of teenage babies by reforming welfare laws that discourage marriage and cracking down on those who try to escape financial responsibility. At the same time, he has dedicated money to beef up prosecution of statutory rape, a crime that often goes unpunished.

“It’s not macho to get a teenager pregnant,” he said in his annual address to the Legislature. “But if you lack the decency to understand that yourself, we’ll give you a year to think about it in county jail.”

Back in Los Angeles, 18-year-old Afrodita said she put the memory of her child’s father behind when he was jailed for statutory rape. She said she joined him--a “much older” man--when she ran away from home in Guatemala four years ago and came to Los Angeles. He was arrested shortly after she became pregnant.

Authorities turned Afrodita over to St. Anne’s, where social workers recall that she arrived with a thorny personality, soured by her forced estrangement from the baby’s father. They also learned, however, that she was a diamond in the rough.

First she learned English. Then she graduated from high school with a 3.4 grade-point average and enrolled in college with the hope of becoming a registered nurse and a U.S. citizen.

Looking back, Afrodita said she realizes that she was not ready to be a parent. But “like many other mothers at St. Anne’s, most of us did not plan to. I guess in most cases, it’s peer pressure--the boyfriends want to have sex.”

If she has a message from her experience, she said it would be more to parents than to children.

“I would tell the parents to have more communication with children--to be their friends and, first of all, to listen,” she said. “If children grow up with a single parent who doesn’t know . . . how to take care of that child, the cycle is going to keep going. . . . My biggest fear right now is to know how to educate my child, how to help him be a good person.”

On the wall of the cafeteria at St. Anne’s, black and white photographs of loving young mothers cuddling their babies prompt Thorpe to recall the human dramas depicted by each of the former residents. Like Afrodita and Michelle, they are the reasons that Thorpe said she has come to believe that “those who are considered incorrigible, I’ve found salvageable.”

But with 24,000 teen births in Los Angeles County each year, the number served by St. Anne’s--the county’s largest resident home--and other facilities is still just a fraction of the need.

In Washington, the issue of unwed and teenage mothers has been hotly debated ever since Vice President Dan Quayle struck a controversial chord with his 1991 speech about television character Murphy Brown. But even though the issue has developed strong bipartisan support--including President Clinton’s--legislation remains stalled.

In Sacramento, Lockyer won passage last year for two bills that dedicated $22 million for teen pregnancy prevention programs such as a media campaign and grants to successful community-based programs. This month, the legislative package that Wilson announced sought to expand some of the same ideas with a total of about $66 million.

The other big challenge in the search for solutions is that successful programs are marked by consistent, long-term and intensive intervention by highly trained personnel.

Fresno County is unique in the state because authorities have assigned teams of social workers to monitor at-risk youth beginning in kindergarten. Since failure in school is a leading indicator of teen pregnancy, authorities there have decided that one solution to a distant future problem is by heading it off with early scholastic achievement.

“The principals say, ‘We can tell you which kids are going to be pregnant just by seeing them [between] kindergarten and sixth grade,’ ” said Howard Hines, director of the county program called K6. “The concept of K6 is to recognize there are issues with the kids at home and until you deal with those issues at home, it doesn’t matter what you do at school.”

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Wilson’s Weapons

In his State of the State address this month, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed a package of reforms intended to help prevent teenage pregnancy. Wilson suggested that the state expand an existing program to enforce statutory rape laws and repeatedly called for limits on welfare payments to teenage mothers. He also introduced three proposals that will be considered this spring by the Legislature to finance three programs.

Media Campaign

A $15.75-million media campaign would attempt to raise public awareness about the problem of unwed and teenage pregnancy. The program would seek to gain private support and increase the reach of advertising. Television and print ads would be aimed toward at-risk teenagers as well as at broad public that could bolster support for prevention programs.

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Community Challenge Grants

Another program would dedicate $34 million for community groups such as churches, businesses, social organizations and families to develop teenage pregnancy prevention programs. Officials hope the grants would expand some existing efforts that have proved successful. The plan also would create a panel to oversee a nongovernmental foundation administering the grants.

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Mentoring

Officials say one of the major problems for at-risk youths is a lack of role models, so $15 million would be assigned to link 250,000 adult mentors with 1 million at-risk youths by 2000.