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 been visiting the Madison Middle School health class in North Hollywood this semester.

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

In an essay composed 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 is ashamed. She had thought she would do a better job. She shook her head in dismay.

“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.”

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

The most dramatic change, a decline of 20.6%, was reported among African American teenagers. The overall trend was a dramatic reversal from the late 1980s, when births to all teenagers rose by 24%.

The news was not as good for Latinas, who give birth to 60% of the babies born to teenage mothers in California, according to the federal report. Since 1991, the birth rate among Latina teenagers has dropped only 4.8%.

The battle against teenage pregnancy has been going on for years, 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, the director of Teen Outreach, a nonprofit, state-funded program targeting “hot spots” of births to teenagers. “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 teenage 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 Los Angeles Unified schools in North Hollywood and Van Nuys, communities where births to Latina teenagers are nearly three times the national average.

Experts cite an improving economy and increased use of condoms in the wake of AIDS as the primary reasons for the 1990s decline in teenage birth rates.

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

For most at-risk teenagers, 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 both boys and girls is that their future choices may depend on decisions they make now.

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

“I just cross my fingers,” Leifeld said, adding that she hoped in moments of passion that her students might be jarred back to reality by the memory of the baby’s 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,” said Joy 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 rates for teens has dropped nearly 12% this decade. The biggest reduction has been in births to African Americans. For Latina teens the birth rate showed only a small decline.

Percent change

White: -8.9%

African Americans: -20.6%

Latinos: -4.8%

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