Number of O.C. Teenagers Having Babies on the Rise

When teenage girls have babies, life’s odds mount fast against them. Many don’t finish school. If they marry, their chances of divorce are higher than average. They’re less likely to receive prenatal care, and their babies are less healthy.

Almost 4,000 teenage girls in Orange County are pregnant or have given birth so far this year. And the numbers are growing. The birthrate to teens increased by 34% between 1990 and 1994.

Health-care officials and social workers point to a host of resulting social ills--from high dropout rates to poor job opportunities--when children have children.

“It’s the No. 1 reason why girls who drop out of school do so,” said Rhonda Simpson-Brown, who heads the teen pregnancy and parenting program at the state Department of Education.

On top of that are the staggering costs to society of the complicated births that teenage pregnancies frequently entail, and the additional spending on welfare, special school programs for mother and child, and the bureaucratic safety net that is often needed to rescue them.

In Orange County, 1,532--or 38%--of mothers age 19 or under receive welfare payments. State figures estimate that the costs of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medi-Cal for a single teen pregnancy, childbirth and first year of support are $10,000. In 1994, the Medi-Cal public insurance program paid for 1,660 deliveries to Orange County mothers under 20. The total number statewide was 33,000.

The issue of teen pregnancy in Orange County has been forced to the forefront again following recent revelations that social services officials and the juvenile court have allowed about 15 pregnant adolescent girls to marry, or resume living with, the adult men who impregnated them, rather than push for prosecution of the men under statutory rape or child-abuse laws.

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The controversy comes amid a highly publicized initiative by Gov. Pete Wilson to reduce teenage birthrates by seeking criminal charges against the adult men who, in California, are responsible for such pregnancies more than two-thirds of the time.

Most children born to girls ages 15 or younger are fathered by men in their 20s--a disparity that is more prevalent in Orange County than any other county in California, said Mike Males, a graduate student at UC Irvine who studies teen pregnancy. In Orange County cases where the mother is 13 to 15 years old, the father was 19 or older 62% of the time, Males said. The statewide figure is 49%.

“Orange County arguably has the most serious adult father-teen mother problem in the state,” Males said.

Even more alarming, experts say the younger the girl giving birth, the more likely she has at some point been forced into sex.

“At the schools where we have programs, we’re seeing a large amount of self-reported sexual assault on young girls by their brothers’ friends and unrelated males in the family. And they do report it as rape,” said Jo Gottfried, teen program coordinator for Girls Inc., a nonprofit agency in Costa Mesa providing social and academic programs for girls. “We were hearing that a lot, and quite busily filing child-abuse reports.”

Many girls at risk for becoming pregnant feel disconnected from their families--and in particular from their mothers, Gottfried said.

“The research shows that a lot of what we’re teaching people when they’re parenting adolescent girls is ‘Don’t worry, she’s 13. It’ll blow over.’ We kind of allow parents to be less involved, when what girls say they need is much more involvement.”

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Eighty-eight Orange County babies were born to girls age 10 to 14 in 1994, according to a preliminary tally by the Social Services Agency that is the most recent available. Girls 15 to 17 had 1,600 babies and those 18 and 19 gave birth to 2,845 babies.

In Orange County, most teen mothers are Latina, a group that accounted for three-quarters of all births to teens.

“We’re certainly seeing an increase in the Hispanic population and they seem to be getting younger and younger and have fewer resources,” said Mary Ann Xavier, executive director of Florence Crittenton Services, a nonprofit agency serving troubled teenagers.

“And we certainly can verify we’re seeing men who are 20-plus,” Xavier said. “Very few are contemporaries.”

Seventeen-year-old Deborah Ceja is living some of these trends.

The Santa Ana resident began dating her boyfriend when she was 13. He was 18. She soon became pregnant and had her first child, a son, at age 14. She has a second who is 16 months old. In the meantime, her boyfriend, Marcos Segura, was deported to Mexico.

Now, Deborah and her two sons live in one room at her mother’s home. She said she receives $200 a month in welfare, half of which she pays to her mother for rent.

“Right now, I’m trying to do the best for my children that I can, so they won’t have to grow up and live in one room like this,” Ceja said. “My mother helps me, and I get welfare--that’s for diapers for the baby and clothes.

“I’m trying to study a lot. Before, I didn’t want to go to school. And now, I’m trying to graduate from high school and get to college--for my kids. It’s not for me. I want to go to college, but I don’t know if I could get to there.”

Ceja is enrolled in the Cal-Learn program, which encourages teen parents on welfare to stay in school. The 539 Orange County teen mothers enrolled in the program must live at home with their parents, attend high school and receive passing grades in order to receive a cash bonus for every semester and a $500 bonus when they graduate.

“It’s an inducement for them to stay with their own mother and to stay in school,” said Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance for the county Social Services Department.

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Shoshana Volkas is Ceja’s social worker and monitors her progress, providing counseling, instruction in life skills, encouragement and support. She and others carry caseloads of about 40 girls.

“A lot of these kids have really difficult backgrounds and they never got the support to learn how to live independent lives,” Volkas said. “Many people think that they should be punished, but what they need is a helping hand. Given that, they tend to do well.”

Generalizing about teen mothers is as unfair as it is to generalize about any other part of the population, Volkas said.

“There are some who have three kids and they go back to school the day after they have their babies and ultimately graduate,” Volkas said. “Then there are others, who, it’s true, are not motivated.”

One of the strongest indications that a girl is at risk of becoming pregnant is attendance at school, experts say.

“Very often, the statistics say that before they become pregnant, they’ve had poor attendance, been truant, their grades were dropping,” said Linda Miller, assistant principal of the La Sierra High School program for teen mothers, run by the Fullerton Joint Union High School District. “Staying in school is a big deterrent to becoming pregnant.”

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Indeed, the burden of looking after teen parents is shifting increasingly to the county schools, where many districts now provide parenting classes or even care for the children while the mothers attend class.

On the grounds of El Dorado High School in Placentia, a complex of four portable buildings houses parenting classes for about 25 young mothers, plus a child-care center for their babies. The program, serving four high schools in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District and others like it around the county, aim to instill nurturing skills and prevent new adolescent mothers from dropping out of school, as many do after bearing a child.

“We lose them. In between changing diapers and feedings, they’re trying to do cultural geography and algebra. It loses its relevance,” said Kathy Lindstrom, a counselor at an alternative high school in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District who used to teach teen mothers.

The girls who drop out, Lindstrom said, “will not have the skills, even the communication skills, that come with reading and writing. . . . Will they be able to go out and become contributing members of society? Right now, they cannot when they’re babies having babies.”

Officials acknowledge the school programs may be catching only a small portion of the teen mothers who drop out after giving birth or move away to conceal their pregnancy. State and county officials had no accurate count of the dropout rate for teen parents.

“We have parents coming to school, but I know there’s a lot out there who aren’t,” said Winni Hopkins, who teaches teen parents at the El Dorado High School-based program.

And the babies born to teens will represent additional education costs when they reach school age. The babies born to teen mothers in Orange County in 1994 could fill 150 extra classrooms by the time they are old enough to go to school in the year 2000.

But Males, the UCI scholar, said trying to assign the social costs of teen childbirth can be misleading and unfair.

The vast majority of adolescent girls who give birth are from poor families to begin with, making them more likely to end up on welfare even without a child, said Males.

“They are very likely to be on welfare anyway. They’re more likely to drop out of school even without the baby,” Males said. “Poverty is the generator of high teen birth rates, not the other way around.”

Males said, for example, that adding up the costs of schooling children of adolescent mothers exaggerates the social toll of teen pregnancy since education would cost the same amount if she waited until her 20s to have a child.

Males said impoverished and often abused teenage girls who become pregnant may see few prospects for themselves and little lost by having a baby.

“The big issue is not the tax cost. It’s the question of what opportunity do they have as an alternative to being a parent,” he said.

Others experts agree that placing sole blame on the girls is counterproductive.

“What I’ve learned after many years in this field is that kids’ behavior makes perfect sense in the context of their environment,” said Gayle Wilson of the California Wellness Foundation in Woodland Hills. “Instead of trying to get tough and fix kids, we need to be more responsible and see where we have failed them.”