Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 28, 1993 TAG: 9311290169
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Rich Martin
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Half my friends are either pregnant or got a baby,'' she said. ``You should have one at 16 while you're healthy.''
She confessed that she first had sex when she was 9. She used birth control for a while, then stopped. She continued to have sex because ``once you try it, you're going to try it again. It's just, it's just a part of nature.''
She was happy with her pregnancy, and she said her best friend was ``jealous ... because I'm pregnant and now she wants to have one.''
Pregnant, and proud.
\ The 15-year-old's story may sound familiar. In fact, it may remind you of a newspaper story that ran a week ago about two best friends, one 16, the other 17, both pregnant.
``If she was pregnant and I wasn't, I knew I'd have to be,'' one said. Both said getting pregnant was the best thing they'd ever done.
Pregnant and proud, read the headline on the story.
The 15-year-old's story is not recent, though. It was reported in 1985 in a newspaper series about teen-age pregnancy in the Roanoke Valley. In the series, counselors and educators described the problem as an ``epidemic.'' One said pregnant 16- and 17-year-olds were ``almost accepted.''
In 1983 - the most recent figures available at the time - 312 Roanoke girls under the age of 18 got pregnant. The pregnancy rate in the city was 114.8 per thousand for girls 15 to 19.
Things haven't gotten better. In 1991, 519 Roanoke girls got pregnant. The pregnancy rate for 15- to 19-year-old girls was 176.5 in Roanoke - the highest in the state and twice the state average.
More numbers pour out. One of every 10 teen-age girls in Roanoke gets pregnant every year. Forty percent of all babies born in the city are to single women. The black teen pregnancy rate is twice the white rate, though there are more white teen pregnancies.
Those are numbers, though - statistics, cold and hard. They don't give a sense of the real issues the city faces with its pregnant teens.
Last month the newspaper began taking another look at the problem. Our intent was to go beyond the numbers, to tell the stories of the pregnant teens and young mothers in human terms, with the names - and faces - of the people in the stories.
The first installment in our series ran Oct. 31. Staff writer Beth Macy and staff photographer Victor W. Vaughan told about an 18-year-old unmarried mother of four, each child fathered by a different man. They showed us the life of a 16-year-old who stayed up all night with her 7-month-old baby, then had to go to school in the morning. They talked to counselors, educators and health experts about why Roanoke's teen pregnancy rate was so high.
We received criticism.
City school officials were unhappy we identified where some of the pregnant teens went to school. One principal told us we weren't welcome on campus because stories about teen pregnancy leave ``the impression we're not doing our job.''
That response was mild compared to the reaction to our story about the pregnant friends. Some readers called or wrote to praise the story, but more than 100 readers complained:
``I think it's a horrible thing to promote and glamorize teen-age pregnancies like this when they have birth control and all this other stuff going on on one hand and turn around and glamorize these two girls on the other hand,'' one said. ``It's a lot more to it than them playing house with those kids.''
A teen-ager felt the story would promote teen pregnancy, saying ``it gives those children who don't have what they need the feeling that it's OK to go out and have sex with somebody who can get you pregnant and not have to worry about it.''
Said another: ``You're glorifying and making them think all of their silly little dreams are going to come true when all they're going to do is end up on welfare with citizens like myself paying for their babies, their deliveries and their housing, food, for the rest of their lives.''
``I would have been ashamed to have anything printed like that when I was 15 or 16,'' a woman in her 60s said. ``It is the most sickening article i've read in your paper for ages.''
``I'm going to cancel my subscription,'' another reader said. ``I can't stand this any more, running such a thing as pregnant teen-agers. Thank you.''
You get the picture. Readers didn't like the story of the pregnant friends or how they reacted to their pregnancies. The situation offended many readers, and they didn't think we should report this slice of life in our community.
School officials, who took a number of calls from citizens, were also enraged, and threatened our already limited access. ``You'll get no cooperation at all if you continue to offer that kind of stuff,'' Superintendent E. Wayne Harris said.
A woman describing herself as an inner-city teacher scolded us as well, saying, ``We're trying to downplay teen pregnancy in the city - and here you are blowing it up.''
Does the story celebrate teen-age pregnancy? Will it encourage young girls to get pregnant?
Does living in public housing sound inviting? Does working in a fast-food restaurant? Does living on welfare? Does raising a child without the support of a father?
I don't think so. And I don't think readers can legitimately say the lives the girls themselves outline is promising.
So why the negative reaction? The headline, perhaps. The nonjudgmental tone of the story. The photograph of the girls, smiling, seemingly carefree.
Editors should have anticipated the reaction. The center of the story - that some teens will get pregnant because their friends are - was chilling, and we should have tried, somehow, to convey our awareness of that shock value in the way we presented the story and photo. And we certainly should have put the story in clearer context with what we reported in our first installment and with what is still to come in the series.
Our purpose is not to pass judgment. We'll leave that to the editorial page. We're trying to alert our community to a major problem - a problem that has social, economic, health and, yes, moral dimensions.
It's a story we've written before, and one that many readers have ignored because we used numbers instead of faces, pseudonyms instead of names, second-hand accounts instead of personal stories.
It's the story of teen-age girls who are pregnant - and proud of it.
It's the story of the 15-year-old girl all over again - except it's eight years later.
Maybe more people will pay attention this time.
\ Rich Martin is deputy managing editor of this newspaper.
by CNB