Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 10, 1994 TAG: 9402250020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But take a wild guess.
What's the cost in welfare for this region's unwed teens and their children? (Having kids as a teen-ager is the surest route to poverty and dependence.)
What's the price tag on building prisons 10 or 15 years from now to house criminals born this year? (The link between single-mother households and increased incidence of criminality and violence is well established.)
How much will be needed for drug-treatment programs for many years to come? (Teen pregnancy and the abuse of drugs and alcohol also go hand in hand.)
What do you figure the total medical costs might be for the lifetime of the 1 pound, 15-ounce baby, born 13 weeks prematurely at Community last month, to a 16-year-old mother who'd had no prenatal care? (Granted, the lifetime may be short: Low-birth-weight infants are more likely to die as babies or toddlers. And teen mothers are more likely than other mothers to give birth to low-birth-weight infants. Care for premature infants is still enormously expensive.)
And, while you're at it, guess what costs society might incur for an 11-year-old girl and her siblings, born to a Roanoke teen mother and sexually abused by their stepfather while the mother was in a treatment program for alcoholics. The 11-year-old already has tried to commit suicide three times.
About now, if you're not sufficiently depressed to have stopped reading, you may be thinking: How crass! To speak of so much human suffering in monetary terms! It's like putting price tags on children's heads.
But the financial costs of teen pregnancy are inescapable.
Dr. Allen, the 16-year-old mother of the palm-size baby, and the suicidal 11-year-old all figure in Beth Macy's story, "Cost and consequence," published Sunday as part of an ongoing series about teen pregnancy in Roanoke.
The costs indeed are incalculable. So are the consequences in suffering.
Taxpayers do, however, bear some identifiable expenses. For instance, welfare payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program run $450,000 a year in Roanoke for 250 teen mothers and their children. Medicaid costs for a normal delivery of a teen mother's baby run $3,500 to $5,000.
By conservative estimate, the public spends well over $2 million on health and social services alone for teen mothers and their children in Roanoke city. In contrast, just over $530,000 is allocated for programs aimed wholly or in part at preventing teen pregnancy.
The effectiveness of Roanoke's few prevention programs is hard to gauge. Obviously, they're not effective enough, because the city's teen-pregnancy rate - the highest in the state - has been getting worse in recent years, not better.
But given the costs and benefits, the quest for any effective prevention strategies - and the funding to carry them out - have to be a higher priority.
Call it a crass viewpoint. But the alternative - doing nothing and letting teen-pregnancy numbers grow unabated - has both costs and consequences that Roanoke can't afford.
by CNB