Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 14, 1992 TAG: 9202140456
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ANNIE IS PREGNANT
ANNIE, a Roanoker, is a white, unmarried 15-year-old, and she is pregnant.She's not sure who the father is. She's been fooling around a year or so now and there've been a couple of guys recently. But that's OK. She remembers the loud, ugly fights - fights that usually left her mother crying and sometimes bruised - before her father left home, when she was 10. She doesn't expect to marry.
And she's not going to have an abortion. Not that she has religious convictions that it would be wrong; she really hasn't thought about that, one way or the other. Or about adoption. What she has thought about is:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a little baby to love, and to love her back? Wouldn't it be nice to get away from her mother's house, which hasn't been a happy place to grow up, and be out on her own? She has a girlfriend who had a baby, got on welfare and now has her own apartment.
You may not know Annie (not her real name), but she is well-known in Roanoke. She's one of the girls who gives this city the dubious distinction of having a teen-pregnancy rate nearly twice the state average, nearly twice as high as any nearby locality.
In Richmond, she's known as one of the "55 a day." That's how many teen-age girls get pregnant every day in Virginia. In Washington, they know her as one of the million teen-agers who get pregnant each year.
In Atlanta, at the Centers for Disease Control, they know she's among the 54 percent of youngsters who become sexually active in high school (40 percent of them by the ninth grade), and who are at risk of contracting and spreading sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Even in Sweden, that fabled land of free love, they've heard about Annie. Sweden, Canada, Britain, France and Holland are among the countries with teen-pregnancy rates considerably lower than in the United States.
Social scientists see Annie as a falling star in a sorry constellation of related social problems: school dropouts, low-birth-weight babies, teen suicides, drug and alcohol usage, inadequate housing, even inadequate public transportation. (There may be counseling and birth-control services available, but a teen-ager has to get to them.)
Annie is known as a product of the breakdown of American families, the growing number of single-parent households, permissive social mores, peer pressure, sex-saturated media. Nobody is quite sure what to do.
Annie has helped inspire state-mandated sex education and Family Life Education programs in the public schools, free-condoms-in-school controversies in some cities, state and federal welfare-reform proposals, and enough research studies and white-paper reports to lay bare entire forests.
In Roanoke, Mayor Noel Taylor has cited teen-age pregnancy as one of the city's most critical problems. Community leaders have addressed the issue in three major studies: "Children Who Have Children: The High Price of Adolescent Pregnancy in Roanoke City," in 1988; "Teen Pregnancy Prevention: Creating Responsibility" in 1990; and "Healthy Youth\ A Healthy Future for the Valley," also in 1990.
At the state level, a citizens' task force, the Virginia Council on Teen Pregnancy Prevention, also has tried in the past year to identify programs that might help reverse this adolescent trend with its staggering social and financial consequences.
By Sunday, the deadline for unveiling budget plans, the money committees at the General Assembly will decide whether the state should spend a modest $800,000 annually in the coming biennium to implement some of the task force's recommendations.
These would include continued funding for so-called Better Beginnings coalitions at work in Roanoke and other communities, and extra funding for health departments in localities such as Roanoke that have high teen-pregnancy rates.
The state spends about $200 million a year to support the children born to the 55 Virginia teens who get pregnant every day. By contrast, $800,000 for prevention seems but an ounce.
Annie, at 15, is pregnant.
Her younger sister isn't - yet.