Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 23, 1992 TAG: 9203230106
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
My elder girl is 14, just a year younger than some of the students I was listening to at the School for Pregnant Teens.
Their stories remind me again that this can happen to any girl; but what is truly depressing is this group's consensus that there is not much I can do to prevent it.
"I don't think you can tell a teen-ager anything to keep them from having sex," said Amy, 15, pregnant and now married.
The six other girls who agreed to be interviewed seemed to join in Amy's gloomy assessment. Yet, she attempted to hold out some kind of hope that communication could work.
"You got to talk to their parents." If parents tell their teens to "just say no" to sex, "they just get more curious. But if parents talk to them the right way, tell them about sex . . . not just how it happens and stuff, but they got to tell them about it."
I know Amy was trying to help, but in some ways she and her classmates' struggle to explain how to get her peers to listen to warnings about teen-age sex was scary.
These girls - like millions before them - just didn't believe what they heard, that they would get pregnant.
"I didn't worry about no birth control because my mama and them used to [joke] that I ain't never going to have no children because I used to like 'em so much," said Pam, 17. "I guess I believed her."
Michelle said her parents "read my diary and they told me that if I needed birth control they would take me to get it. But they never made me feel like I could really go to them."
Her classmates were adamant that parents should be more understanding when their daughters come home with the news of their pregnancies.
Pam was six months pregnant before she told her mother or even went to a doctor to confirm that a baby was on the way. She was so sick during her pregnancy that early on, she said, she lost 25 pounds. Her daughter weighed only 5 pounds, 11 ounces at birth.
"My daddy didn't speak to me for the whole nine months . . . but when I was in labor, he went in the delivery room with me," Pan said.
The response is sometimes supportive - 16-year-old Koren said her mother offered to help support her baby if she would stay in school - but more often, the reaction is indifference or abusive.
"My mama was one of those who didn't care what I did," said 15-year-old Tonya, who is married to the father of her unborn child. "I couldn't tell her anything."
"My mama called me all kinds of names with my first one," said Lajuan, 18. "I told her this was my life and I'd do what I want with it."
The boys and men in these girls' lives often are the cause of lots of pain, too.
The boys who get girls pregnant often drop out of sight or refuse to take any responsibility for the child, even though they often plead with the girls not to have abortions.
Hope, 18, decided to have the baby she is carrying, but she admitted to having had an abortion two years ago. It was a lonely decision, made on her own.
Most of these girls have serious reservations about abortion any time, though, a position often reinforced at home.
"My mama said, `That baby didn't ask to be born in this world and there's no use for you to go and kill it. You made your mistake, now you got to take care of it.' "
Others talked about how they didn't think they would have an abortion even if they became pregnant after a rape. And the idea of giving a baby up for adoption after carrying it full term seemed unimaginable to most.
Yet, they were hesitant to endorse any law that would require a girl to tell her parents before getting an abortion.
"I don't think they should have to tell their parents because some parents might beat the `you know what' out of 'em. You know how some people's parents . . . threaten them and tell them they're going to beat the baby out of them," Lajuan said.
Even Amy, the only one in this group who insisted that parents ought to be told, was equally insistent that the final decision "should be up to the child."
For Pam, second thoughts persisted as she neared delivery.
"I wasn't working nowhere and every little bit of money I was getting I was buying baby stuff with, and I ain't really bought nothing for myself. I was wondering whether I should have went on and had an abortion, and not kept it. Like next year, when I'll be going to regular school, I'm wondering what I'll do with my baby. Will I miss school 'cause I can't afford to pay nobody for a baby sitter? I ain't old enough to get welfare. . . . But now that [the baby] is here, I guess I'll take it one day at a time."
Pam issued the summary for other teens.
"Tell them everything is gonna be different. Like if I want to go out, I got to stay home with my baby 'cause my mom be at work and I ain't got nobody to keep her.
"I need shoes and I need this, but my baby's got to come first. They need to know . . ."
And I am left to wonder whether a law that would require my daughter to talk to me - fulfill my "need to know" - would ultimately harm her or help her.
by CNB