A Bundle of Responsibility

On a Monday morning, her baby doll wrapped in a pink knit blanket, 12-year-old Tiarra Hirsch awaited the verdict on her parenting skills.

“Ten abuses, five neglects and 10 minutes of crying,” said Jessica Leifeld, the pregnancy prevention counselor who has visited the Madison Middle School health class all semester.

“Oh, my God,” said Tiarra, her face dropping. “I can’t get over that.”

In an essay the week before, Tiarra wrote: “I know that I would not even let anyone try to abuse my baby or I would kick their you-know-what.”

But Friday night, when the doll cried for what seemed like the millionth time, Tiarra threw it across the room. Now, chewing on her pen before filling out a work sheet on her parenting experience, Tiarra was ashamed. She had thought she would do a better job. She shook her head thinking about it.

“I was mad,” she said. “The crying and crying and crying.

“I’m not ready to be a mom,” Tiarra said. “I’m going to wait until I’m older.”

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Nationwide, the teen birthrate this decade has fallen steadily, 12% since 1991, according to federal statistics released in May.

The most dramatic change, a decline of 20%, was reported among African American teens. The overall trend was a dramatic reversal from the late 1980s when births to all teens skyrocketed by 24%.

While the news was greeted as progress, the reasons for the drop remain something of a mystery.

The news was not as good for Latinas, who give birth to 60% of babies born to teen mothers in California. Latina teens are now giving birth at a rate higher than all other ethnicities, according to the federal report. Since 1991, the birthrate among Latina teens has dropped only 4.8%.

The battle against teen pregnancy is now more than a decade old, but those on the front lines admit they still don’t know what works.

“If we knew what to do, we would patent it,” said April Joy, director of Teen Outreach, a nonprofit, state-funded program targeting “hot spots” of births to teenagers. “If we had a little pill, we’d give it out. But there are so many variables. We’re just trying a variety of things and hope that some of them get through.”

California, with the 11th-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, spent nearly $80 million last year on a variety of pregnancy-prevention programs, ranging from community challenge grants to more-aggressive prosecution of statutory rape.

Joy’s program, for example, is in LAUSD schools in North Hollywood and Van Nuys, communities where births to Latina teens are nearly three times the national average.

Still, teenagers have babies.

It wasn’t until her water broke--not in a sudden gush as she thought would happen but leaking little by little--that 17-year-old Janet Garcia decided she had to tell her mother she was pregnant. Even then she went to bed first, waiting until dawn to confess, her baby kicking insistently while she tried to sleep.

For months she had kept the secret, her swelling belly easily hidden by her large frame and baggy clothes. Her parents had always told her she needed to have an education before she had a family. She was scared. What kind of life would her baby have?

The high school senior knew she was too young to be a mother. Her pregnancy wasn’t planned. But she and her boyfriend, Ricky Miramontez, 18, had sex regularly without using birth control.

“I guess we just thought it wouldn’t happen to us,” Miramontez said.

The unanswerable question--even to Garcia, a solid student with ambitions for a career in medicine--is, what could have prevented her from getting pregnant? No single message seems to be an effective deterrent, with opinions on what helps ranging from abstinence to distributing condoms in the schools.

But, in fact, experts cite an improving economy and increased use of condoms in the wake of AIDS as the primary reasons for the decline in teen birthrates.

One thing is clear: Having a baby as a teenager increases the health risks for both mother and child, and makes living in poverty, dropping out of school and relying on welfare more likely.

Linda Ward Russell, head of the Pregnant Minor Task Force for LAUSD, said the fight against teen pregnancy is complicated by many factors that start long before students reach middle school.

“We really need to change the teen’s world view to make progress,” Russell said. “If they don’t see a future, it may make no difference to them if they give birth at 15 or at 25.”

For most at-risk teens, having babies early is commonplace. Tiarra’s mother was already married and having her first child at 16. One girl in Tiarra’s North Hollywood neighborhood, who was 15 when she had her first child, is now, at 17, pregnant with her second.

Tiarra’s classmates, boys and girls both, say they have parents, friends, relatives and neighbors who had babies in their teen years.

“I think boys feel macho when they have sex, and the girls feel special,” Tiarra said.

Counselors and teachers say that sentiment is not new. What they try to show boys and girls is that their future may depend on decisions they make now.

Leifeld, the counselor, said she feels the program has had an impact on students but admitted it is hard to predict its long-term effect.

“I just cross my fingers,” Leifeld said, adding she hoped her students, in moments of passion, might be jarred back to reality by the memory of the baby cries.

Joy, who works with the students at Van Nuys High School, said in her work there are good days and bad days.

In the hallway before class, she talked to a lanky girl with a freckled face and dirty blond hair. The girl, now 17, had a baby at 12. Last week, she told Joy she was pregnant again.

“You know,” Joy said later, “she was one of the loudest ones about what a mistake it was to get pregnant so young. She said she wouldn’t let it happen again. But no matter how good your intentions are, no matter what you said, there is nothing that can replace that warm fuzzy feeling of being intimate with someone.

“When they fall in love, I think they forget everything we’ve talked about.”

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Teenage Births Decline

Federal officials announced last month that the birth rate for teens has dropped nearly 12% this decade. The biggest reduction has been in births to African Americans. For Latinos the birth rate showed only a small decline.

White: -8.9%

African American: -20.6%

Latino: -4.8%

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services