Teen Pregnancies Force Town to Grow Up

The road that leads to this little farm town curves gently past a slice of classic Americana: solid red barns and fields of golden corn and a sign that beckons “Eat Here and Get Gas.” This was the route William Stone traveled three years ago when he left the big-city life behind to give Tipton something it never had: a baby doctor.

After 20 years of practicing obstetrics and gynecology in Indianapolis, the 52-year-old physician was eager to set up shop in a community where he might make a difference. And what a difference this doctor has made--in ways he would have least expected.

The first thing he noticed were the teenagers. Girls, some as young as 14, growing babies in their bellies. And not the stereotypical troubled teens, but girls from good families, girls in the National Honor Society at school.

In his first year of practice, Stone delivered infants to 16 teenagers, although not all were from Tipton. He did a little checking and discovered that unwed teens accounted for 11.8% of births in Tipton County--a rate slightly higher than both Indiana’s and the nation’s.

So it was that in August 1994, the doctor boldly informed his new hometown that it had a teen pregnancy problem. It was a declaration that has turned this quiet corner of the Midwest into a living civics class, throwing open a Pandora’s box of questions about teenage sexuality, unwed motherhood and, most important, the values that parents impart to children.

Stone was not drummed out of Tipton. Rather, the community embraced him, taking the first simple steps toward solving a problem that bedevils the nation.

Listen to the troubled voices of Tipton and one can hear the voices of a troubled America. Adults preach abstinence but secretly expect their kids to have sex--and then worry that they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. A local minister wonders aloud whatever happened to shame.

A young mother, one of Stone’s former patients, has vowed abstinence until she finds a husband. “I thought I loved him,” she said of her son’s father. “He showed me lots of attention, like he loved me. We broke up two weeks after I got pregnant.”

In a community that prides itself on neighbor helping neighbor, people are now chiding themselves for coddling teen mothers. Educators fret over whether they have made it too easy for pregnant girls to get a diploma. Some are suggesting that teen fathers be banned from school sports.

At Tipton High School, the administration has cracked down on necking in the hallways. The quarterback got his girlfriend pregnant--and married her. Some teammates said they think that’s cool.

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Mayor David Berkemeier pulled the plug at home on MTV--too many explicit scenes for his 15-year-old cheerleader daughter. The daughter, a bouncy strawberry blond with a creamy complexion and braces, has a confession to make: It’s a relief not to have a boyfriend just yet.

“I don’t have to worry about anything right now,” Amy Berkemeier explained, “like is the condom on right, or what’s going to happen this weekend.”

It has been two years since Stone launched this soul-searching with the creation of the Tipton County Teen Pregnancy Coalition. It is too soon to tell if teen births have been reduced. But with all this debate going on, longtime residents see subtle changes in the town.

“People are taking a deeper look at their values and their children,” said Judy Watson, who last year found herself in the awkward position of counseling two of her daughter’s friends who thought they were pregnant. “I think parents are now seeing the results of us getting away from what used to be a strict moral code, and they are realizing we have to stop this and change it.”

‘Values Agenda’ Resonates With Voters

Values. It is a political buzzword if ever there was one.

Throughout this election year, Republicans and Democrats wrestled for control of the “values agenda.” The theme resonates strongly with voters; a Los Angeles Times Poll in April found 78% of respondents were dissatisfied with society’s moral values.

Deeply intertwined with this dissatisfaction is a matter that has left parents tongue-tied for decades: sex. And in particular, sex among young, unmarried people.

“If you peel away all the layers of the onion,” said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values in New York, “this is the heart of the values debate--what we believe and how we act regarding sexuality, procreation and marriage, especially the connection of those three, or the growing disconnection.”

Of course, teenage sex was not invented yesterday; the backseat of the ’57 Chevy earned its place in history for a reason. What is different today, however, is that adolescents are having sex sooner, and marriage is rarely a requirement.

If college was once the time for decisions about sex, that moment now arrives in high school. Today, 71% of teenagers--more than half of girls and three-quarters of boys--have had sex by their 18th birthdays, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based group that conducts research into reproductive health. Nationally, about 1 million teenage girls, or 12%, become pregnant every year, according to 1996 statistics.

In the mid-1950s, by contrast, one-quarter of girls were sexually active before age 18. (There are no data for boys during that period.) And studies show that even in this climate of fear about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, boys and girls are initiating sex earlier than 20 years ago.

Popular culture has played an important role. Gone are the days when Ed Sullivan forced the Rolling Stones to switch the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.” But while it would be easy to lay the blame entirely on the sexual revolution, experts say that is not the whole story.

Other forces are at work: With more women employed and cutbacks in after-school activities, teens spend more time unsupervised. There is more drug and alcohol use among adolescents, factors that contribute to teen sex.

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Biology is also a factor. Young people reach puberty sooner than ever; the average age at which a girl begins menstruating is 12 1/2, compared with nearly 15 a century ago. When hormones kick in sooner, experts say, sex begins earlier.

At the same time, people are marrying later--on average three to four years later than in the 1950s. And so the disconnection, to use Blankenhorn’s word, between sex and marriage has become inevitable. The Guttmacher Institute says 96% of sexually active teenage girls were not married when they first had sex. Paradoxically, the vast majority of respondents to the Times Poll said they are teaching their children to abstain from sex until marriage.

“I don’t know of a society in the history of the world that has simultaneously stretched out marriage so long and has successfully preached abstinence before marriage,” said William Galston, a former domestic policy advisor to President Clinton who heads the “religious and public values” task force of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

“My guess,” he said, “is that most people, in their heart of hearts, wish that teens would abstain. But they are not sure that they will and are not sure what the best response is to the fact that many of them won’t.”

‘There Was a Lot of Denial’

That is precisely what the people of Tipton are trying to figure out. But first they had to get over the shock of Stone’s numbers.

“It kind of panicked people,” said Mark Anderson, associate pastor of the West Street Christian Church. “There was a lot of denial.”

Tipton is a tiny place--4,800 people in the city proper, 16,000 in Tipton County. Its population is homogenous--99% white, mostly working class and middle class. Religion is taken seriously; the county has 40 churches. Politics are conservative; Dan Quayle, the former vice president known for his “Murphy Brown” speech lambasting unwed motherhood, lives just 30 miles down the road.

It’s the kind of place where “football moms” throw spaghetti dinners for the high school team, where the community theater production of “The Wizard of Oz” features the mayor as the wizard.

So it came as no surprise to Stone that the townspeople did not warmly embrace his news. “This community,” the doctor said, “is very proud of itself. Its good living, a good substantial economy, safe, good education, basic good people. So they don’t want to hear that they have any shortcomings.”

Yet they did not turn a deaf ear. Mayor Berkemeier is one who easily could have; surely it serves no political purpose to make a big deal of teen pregnancy in a small town. Instead, Tipton’s biggest booster joined the board of the teen pregnancy coalition.

Berkemeier sees Stone’s figures as evidence of “a breakdown in the family,” and he has all kinds of ideas about how to correct that--a family night with bingo and hayrides at the fairgrounds, a day when Tipton turns off its TVs. But he remains genuinely puzzled about why the city in which he has invested so much of himself would need a pregnancy prevention group in the first place.

“I don’t see how you can go to church and believe in God and be conservative and how the family can be falling apart with that scenario,” he said, shaking his head.

What is going on in Tipton is the same thing that is going on in the rest of America. A sensibility about sex, a taboo, has been lost. And teenagers are just as worried about it as their parents.

Once upon a time, the rules were clear. Boys generally did as they pleased, while Mom and Dad looked the other way. Girls, at least nice girls, didn’t--or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. Now those boundaries have been thrown out the window--in Tipton and everywhere else.

“It’s not like if you have sex with your boyfriend you’re considered a slut,” said Amy Berkemeier, a sophomore at Tipton High School. “It’s like, ‘Well, oh that’s sweet, you guys are in love.’ ”

Said her friend, Carrie Campbell: “People that you would totally think wouldn’t have sex are having sex.”

So far, these girls have escaped the “do I or don’t I” decision. But the moment is inevitable; Amy Berkemeier expects that it will come next year, when she turns 16.

“If you were to go out with a 15-year-old guy, what are you going to do on the weekends? It’s going to be your parents taking you someplace. But when you’re 16,” she explained, “you have a car. I could easily see a situation where it would come into play.”

The decision is just as momentous for boys as for girls.

On a crisp fall morning, the Tipton High School Blue Devils can be found on the field, finishing practice for the big Friday night game. The coach blows his whistle, and they rush for the locker room, sweaty and covered with mud. They exude the mix of buoyancy and cockiness that comes with being a jock. Yet ask these boys about sex, and the conversation reveals more conflict that confidence.

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First, one must get past the macho talk:

“You got hormones going,” said Mark Surber, a senior.

“What else does an 18-year-old American male think about?” asked Todd Whaley, his classmate.

“There ain’t no stopping it,” proclaimed sophomore Brandon Cox.

But probe a little deeper and the conversation takes a surprising turn. One player volunteered that most of his friends use birth control. “They’re more responsible than their parents give them credit for.”

This holds true nationwide; the Guttmacher Institute reports that two-thirds of adolescents use contraception the first time they have sex and that teenage girls are just as successful at avoiding pregnancy as older women.

Another boy, 16, said he had sex with his girlfriend and regrets it. “It wasn’t fair to me or the girl, so we haven’t done it again. . . . I wish I had waited until maybe I was married or in college with a serious relationship.”

All of which begs a question: Are kids confused about sex?

“They are confused,” Cox said, “after they have sex.”

Mixed Messages Spark Confusion

This is no big surprise to Robin Robinson. A respected scholar on the lives of adolescent girls, Robinson is the director of evaluation at the federal government’s Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs. As part of an effort to assess a variety of federally funded programs, she and her colleagues have interviewed hundreds of young people all over the country.

Teenagers, Robinson has found, are indeed confused. They are worried about AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. Meanwhile, adults keep bombarding them with sexual messages--in the form of movies, advertising, music and TV.

Calvin Klein uses nymphs to sell underwear. Ross and Rachel sleep together on “Friends.” Even YM magazine, a favorite of preteens, is no longer safe. The November issue tells girls what to do if their moms catch them masturbating. (“Just act normal.” And next time, lock the door.)

All the while, parents and teachers pound home the virtues of abstinence. Don’t have sex; you could wind up pregnant. Don’t have sex; you could wind up dead.

“The messages are so conflicting,” Robinson said. “When it was the norm for 14- and 15-year-olds to get married and have children, there was no conflict about teen sex. Juliet and Romeo got married and had sex, and it’s one of the great stories that kids in high school read. The irony is not lost on them. . . . We are presenting kids with a sexually stimulating world and then requiring them not to respond to it.”

The mothers and fathers of Tipton inhabit this world, and they are frightened by it. Rhonda Smith is among them.

About a month ago, Smith’s 13-year-old daughter went to a dance at Tipton’s middle school. The “in” thing in Tipton, Smith explains, is for girls to wear party dresses to dances. That may sound sweet, but Smith has news for the uninitiated in the parenting of teenagers.

“A party dress today,” she explained, “is not a little frilly ruffly dress. It’s a little sleeveless short black cocktail dress. It may be absolutely darling, except that my daughter, at 13, is 5-foot-7 and busty. You put her in that dress and she looks like she’s 21.”

The 44-year-old mother sighed.

“When I was in middle school, we wouldn’t have worn a dress like that. And of course, my kids say, ‘Well, this is the ‘90s.’ That’s what they see on TV, and it’s accepted. I think we do everything earlier now. You get to date earlier, you get to go to the prom earlier, you wear little provocative dresses earlier.”

What the people of Tipton--indeed, the people of America--would like to know is how they might push back the timeline a little bit.

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The nation is dotted with pregnancy-prevention groups like Tipton’s, and nearly every school district has some form of sex education. The trouble is, nobody knows if these programs work.

The few that have been subjected to rigorous evaluation have shown mixed results; a 1995 study by the Institute of Medicine found that among 200 popular programs that address unintended pregnancy, only 23 had undergone detailed evaluation and just 13 “were even somewhat effective.”

“We are just at the beginning point of understanding what we can do,” said Felicia Stewart, director of reproductive health programs at the Kaiser Family Foundation in San Francisco. “We know that it isn’t good enough to say, ‘Just don’t do it.’ ”

But the question of what should be said is hugely divisive. Conservatives, particularly those aligned with the religious right, insist that the message should be abstinence until marriage. And in its welfare reform bill, Congress appropriated $250 million for “abstinence only” sex-education programs.

Most educators say that won’t work; the programs that have proved successful, they say, are those that tell teens abstinence is safest but offer them birth control if they choose not to abstain.

Still others suggest that teens should “abstain now,” while artfully dodging the question of what they might do later.

Town Looks for Proper Course

In Tipton, the debate reflects the sensibilities of the town.

At coalition meetings, the idea of distributing condoms in the schools has been raised only jokingly. In the back room at the hospital, Stone said, the talk among doctors is that what Tipton really needs is a Planned Parenthood clinic, where young people might easily obtain birth control.

“That,” the obstetrician said without hesitation, “is not going to happen. The community is not going to stand for it.”

Meanwhile, the soul-searching continues in Tipton and across America. Galston, the former Clinton advisor, sees a nation looking for “a new balance,” a middle ground between the puritanical 1950s and the permissive 1990s.

He said the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy hopes to “locate what might be called the moral center of gravity on this issue” and to craft recommendations that local groups like the one in Tipton might follow.

In the interim, the Tipton coalition is charting its own course. Its goal is simple: to bring back the stigma to teen sex and teen pregnancy. It may take years, maybe decades, but as Stone sees it, there is only one long-term solution, and that is to change the culture.

“What we are really challenging,” the obstetrician said, “is the values of the community.”