Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 24, 1993 TAG: 9311250357
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: more
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Predictably, some of the reaction blames the messenger. This article, part of a series, was published not to glamorize two teen-agers' pregnancy, but to open a window into their minds. Some people may prefer to deny or ignore what Macy reported.
But plainly, a lot of people don't like the idea of a teen-ager setting out, as a life plan, to have kids out of wedlock and move into public housing. They believe such a teen is misguided and wrong, and shouldn't be a role model.
They are right.
Yet the question remains: Is everyone content to spew outrage or wring hands? Does it help to decry a story that illuminates a piece of the illegitimate-birth-rate puzzle?
Or would it be better if our community tried to f+idoo something about it?
Let's be clear on a few things:
The teens featured in Macy's article are not representative of all teens who become pregnant. Most do not become so with the intent of having children. Moreover, the subjects of the article happen to be black, but they could just as easily have been white.
There are, in fact, more white teen pregnancies every year in the city of Roanoke than there are black, though the black rate is twice the white rate. Nor is teen pregnancy confined to city limits or low-income families, though suburbanite teens are more likely to have abortions.
Teen pregnancy is not a black problem, not a city problem, not a school problem. It is a problem for the entire community, and the community needs to come together to address it.
Public programs cannot substitute for healthy, stable families; community responsibility cannot replace individual responsibility.
We could drop condoms on the city by the planeload, or brand scarlet letters on every pregnant teen's forehead, and still not solve the problem. This isn't something government can do for people; teens have to learn responsibility for themselves. If peers, television, movies, home life and hormones all conspire against right thinking on sex, there are limits on what institutions can do.
But this is not to say a community has no stake in helping, or no means to have an impact. Public programs and communities have to pay, certainly, for the consequences of teen pregnancy. In 1991, Virginia spent $285 million in Medicaid, Aid to Dependent Children and food stamps to support families
started by teen-agers.
And this doesn't account for the costs of drug abuse and criminality, which occur at higher rates among the offspring of unmarried teens, or for the terrible human toll in lost lives and unrealized potential. Given such costs, even marginal improvements in teen pregnancy rates are worth substantial efforts.
And we can have an impact. Some Virginia localities have "Better Beginnings" coalitions, community-based groups that craft strategies to reduce teen pregnancy tailored to their communities' circumstances. From 1990 to 1991, the state's teen pregnancy rate fell from 48.5 pregnancies per 1,000 teens to 45.4 per 1,000. The rate of decline for localities that had Better Beginnings coalitions was 4.5. The decline for those without was 1.9 pregnancies per thousand.
Roanoke needs to give its teen-pregnancy epidemic a higher level of attention. A high-level get-together of leaders from education, human services, government and business could help.
It's right to promote middle-class values. Teens shouldn't be having babies they can't support. But how about getting that message to them?
In their past two sessions, Virginia legislators have been asked to fund a public-awareness campaign modeled after Maryland's highly regarded "Campaign for Our Children," which promotes postponement of sexual activity. Lawmakers gave not a penny. And they excluded Roanoke entirely from a small appropriation for Better Beginnings projects, even though Roanoke's teen pregnancy rate is the state's highest.
School-based campaigns against smoking, which combine personal testimony, factual information and sophisticated use of media, have been effective. Smoking isn't cool; why not have a campaign to spread the same message about teen pregnancy? Why not get Surgeon General and charismatic expert Joycelyn Elders here to talk to teens and help spur community action?
Out-of-wedlock births can't be addressed in isolation. They are a piece of larger social pathologies, particularly poverty. We need more health clinics and mentoring in schools, but we cannot deal only with teens; in some cases, that's too late.
Children enrolled in Head Start, for instance, are twice as likely to avoid pregnancy when they are teen-agers as those who are not enrolled. So finding a place in Head Start for every eligible child represents, in effect, a teen-pregnancy-reduction policy.
Beyond that, a national reconfiguring of carrots and sticks is needed to break the cycle of teens bearing prospective welfare mothers. Both the Clinton administration and Virginia officials have talked about ending assistance for the able-bodied after two years of payments. Let's get on with that, and with the child-care help, education and job training to make it possible.
The players in the world Macy describes - girls seeking babies for emotional fulfillment, boys creating babies without a thought of fathering them - seem sadly disconnected from a sense of their future.
Remonstration and punitive policies aren't effective with teens who devalue their worth, who fail to appreciate their potential. Our teen-agers need help learning self-respect. They also need the prospect of economic opportunity to encourage investment in a better future.
The question remains: What are we going to do about it?
by CNB