Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 22, 1995 TAG: 9503220039
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Their stories, in the Extra section this past weekend, are disappointingly familiar. The same four Roanoke girls were among those featured last year in this newspaper's ``One Out of Every 10'' series, which jarred the community's complacency and helped prompt formation of a task force to study ways to reduce teen pregnancies.
And what reaction now to the news that the four, still unmarried, are pregnant again?
Some Roanokers surely feel disgust. How could girls be so stupid? So irresponsible? So immoral?
Also: indignation, even red-hot anger. Despite a new state law limiting welfare payments to such mothers, taxpayers may have to pick up some of the financial burden for these families. If not Aid to Families With Dependent Children payments, food stamps or Medicaid now, then possibly greater costs in the future, given the statistical association of social ills - such as drug addiction, crime and poverty - with teens having babies.
Some may feel vindicated. Those who think the answer is better sex education and easier access to birth control may find evidence here that they're right. But so, too, may those who believe sex education is harmful, who believe that easy birth control sends a message condoning teen sex and reinforcing the pop-culture theme that everybody's doing it.
Others may react with despair. What can a city task force or social workers or anyone else do about this if some young girls see nothing out of sync about having babies out of wedlock? If they see it not as a mistake, much less a social stigma, but as a status symbol? ``It's so much of an in thing,'' one of the four said.
The attitude is baffling - to so casually close off options not only for one's own life but also for the lives of one's children - and it is a complex social phenomenon. But just as the solution can't be simply to shame girls already lacking in self-esteem, or to excuse the behavior as merely another lifestyle option, neither can the answer be to throw up our hands in defeat.
Be reminded: Thousands of teen-age girls in Roanoke have yet to get pregnant the first time. They're smart enough to know that babies are cute and cuddly but also hard work; that babies' presumed unconditional love for their mothers in fact imposes commitments requiring emotional and financial maturity. They're not foolish enough to imagine that having a baby is their passport out of an unhappy home.
Most teen-age girls practice abstinence, or don't``forget'' to take their pills or to use another form of pregnancy prevention. Many know better because their parents taught them. Others know because schoolteachers, church leaders or other caring adults took the time to help them make sensible decisions about sexual behavior and hoped-for futures.
Kids don't always think rationally about long-term results of their actions. It would be no less irrational, though, for the community to conclude: "No use trying, nothing works."
Some things have an effect. The Teen Outreach Program (TOP) at Patrick Henry High School and the West End Center's after-school program for at-risk youngsters, to cite two local examples, are having a positive impact on teens' lives. Such efforts, the evidence suggests, help prevent teen pregnancy - even when that isn't their only or principal mission.
Indeed, teen pregnancy ought to be regarded not just as a problem in itself, but as part of a broader set of interlocking difficulties to which unwed pregnancy is a too-frequent response. Irresponsible males who get girls pregnant deserve a bigger share of the blame and attention for this problem, just as the vast majority of teens who do act responsibly deserve more credit than they sometimes receive.
Outrage about these girls' pregnancy is not only appropriate; it's needed. It's how we define our collective morality. Eventually, though, our actions must have more to do with prevention and positive reinforcement and the expansion of hope, than with contempt and punishment. While despairing at the choices some teen-agers have made, we must campaign against the replication of these choices by others. Expanding initiatives like TOP and the West End Center into other schools and other neighborhoods would be one small but hopeful response.
Keywords:
TEEN PREGNANCY
by CNB