Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 23, 1994                   TAG: 9405240010
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STATE COMMISSION

Here's a better idea: To save time, just dust off the 1991 statewide study of the teen-pregnancy problem.

Or check out the statewide study done in 1989.

Or the one done in 1988.

Or the 1986 study.

(You get the idea.)

The commission would find, we guarantee, a lot of unused ideas for mounting a campaign to reduce teen pregnancies - which occur at the rate of about 55 a day in Virginia.

The commission would also discover that the General Assembly has been absurdly tight-fisted with state funds for teen-pregnancy prevention efforts.

Granted, lawmakers have put up some money in dibs and dabs for pilot programs in some communities, including this year, for the first time, the city of Roanoke.

But teen-pregnancy prevention has never been a priority for legislators, despite the fact that it is a seed of numerous socioeconomic ills that put huge cost burdens on the state - including out-of-control prison populations, drug abuse, school failures, health problems, and, yes, swollen welfare rolls.

Gov. Allen is exactly right about this: Teen pregnancy is a central issue of welfare reform.

In Virginia, 42 percent of funding for Aid to Families with Dependent Children goes to women who were in their teens when they had their first baby.

In 1991, the statewide study by the Virginia Council on Teen Pregnancy Prevention estimated that it costs state taxpayers $200 million a year to support Virginia teen-agers who get pregnant and the 80 percent of their babies who are born out of wedlock.

That figure doesn't include incalculable social costs, such as crime, which are linked to teen-pregnancy. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest toll: lost potential for the young mothers and their children.

Clearly, the governor's welfare-reform task force, the Commission on Citizen Empowerment, has to address the teen-pregnancy issue.

It is hard, though, to fathom why another study is needed, or what possibly could be accomplished by it. Studies of teen pregnancy are not the equivalent of action, and as state Sen. Stanley Walker of Norfolk succinctly observes, "we've studied it to death."