ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 TAG: 9610300060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: EMMETT, IDAHO
SOURCE: JAMES BROOKE THE NEW YORK TIMES
THE PROSECUTING ATTORNEY is charging the girls and their boyfriends in an effort to restore social disgrace to teen-age pregnancy.
Seven months' pregnant and 17, Amanda Smisek received a court summons last spring charging her with a crime she had never learned about in high school: fornication.
``My mom went down to the library and looked it up in the law dictionary,'' Smisek said last week after bottle-feeding her newborn son, Tyler. ``Nobody ever told us it was illegal for two people of the same age to do that.''
As communities around the nation search for ways to curb teen pregnancies, some have opted for more sex education in high schools, some for easier access to contraceptives, and some for stiffer enforcement of statutory rape laws. Orange County, in Southern California, is promoting a modern brand of shotgun marriage in which some adult fathers face marriage or jail.
Here in Gem County, Douglas R. Varie, the county's prosecuting attorney, last spring dusted off the state's 1921 law prohibiting fornication, or, as the statute defines it, sex between unmarried people of the opposite sex.
``Children having children impose a heavy burden on society,'' Varie, a 33-year-old elected official, wrote in an open letter of explanation to residents. ``It's a sad thing for a child to only know his or her natural father as someone who had a good time with his mother in the back seat of a car.''
Pushing communities to action springs from the concern that the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate of almost all major industrialized nations, according to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. About 12 percent of all births in the United States are to teen-age girls. Most of the fathers are older than 18.
This national problem is no stranger to Gem County, a blue-collar corner of sagebrush, cherry orchards, cattle ranches, a lumber mill and a drag strip in western Idaho, just over a mountain pass from Boise. Gem County's rate of 84 pregnancies per 1,000 teen-agers is slightly lower than the national average, but about 50 percent higher than Idaho's average.
As part of an effort to restore social disgrace to teen-age pregnancy, Smisek became the first of about 10 pregnant teen-age girls who have been charged with fornication, along with their boyfriends, after the prosecutor was alerted to the pregnancies by teachers, family members or social workers.
The teens usually plead guilty. Smisek opted for a trial before a Juvenile Court judge, and her lawyer argued unsuccessfully that the statute was being selectively applied.
At Smisek's prosecution, protests erupted with pickets on the courthouse lawn. At a protest over Smisek's sentencing in May, one woman held a sign reading, ``She's pregnant; why make her criminal?''
In response, Varie noted that juvenile records were automatically sealed when a convicted teen-ager turned 18. The sentences for Smisek and her 16-year-old boyfriend, Chris Lay, did not call for jail time or fines; they are designed to channel the teens into responsible parenthood. Placed on probation for three years, the couple are required to attend parenting classes together, to complete their high school educations, to stay employed and to stay off drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Violations of probation are dealt with through counseling rather than jail.
Juanita Goslin, a friend of the Smisek family and court protester, fumed one day last week: ``What makes me mad is that old law states `anyone' - it doesn't state `teen-agers.' That's discrimination.''
That objection is echoed in Boise, the state capital 35 miles southeast of here, by Jack VanValkenburgh, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho.
``To the extent that the prosecutions are targeting teen-agers, and the law applies to everybody, it is selective prosecution, and it denies equal protection of the law,'' he said. ``We just don't think that it is appropriate for the heavy hand of government to get involved in consensual behavior.''
The prosecutor's supporters here say he is trying to restore a lost sense of shame that went with teen-age pregnancy out of wedlock.
Down at Emmett's igloo-shaped high school, the impact of the anti-fornication campaign seems mixed.
Duane Horning, the principal, spent most of an afternoon last week meeting with parents about revising the school's sex education course.
``Students weren't aware of the laws regarding sexual behavior, and a lot of parents weren't either,'' the principal said. The fornication prosecutions, he added, ``got a lot of publicity, but I don't think they are discouraging kids from having sex.''
Similar views were voiced by a knot of cheerleaders as they waited to board a bus with the school team, the Huskies.
Kathleen Green, a junior, said ``I don't see any lesson out of it. People are going to do it, no matter what.''
Green, whose sister got pregnant while in high school, added: ``Just leave them alone. If they want to be moms, that's their choice.''
About half of Idaho high school seniors have had sex at least once, according to the results of a statewide survey conducted last year. In a separate poll of Boise High School students conducted last month, 79 percent said they wanted an improved sex education program.
``We have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world because we don't educate our teens,'' said Jeanette Germain, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Idaho. ``We don't provide health services.''
Germain opposes the fornication prosecutions, but she said she had noticed one concrete result: More families are driving from Emmett with their teen-age children to attend sex education classes at Planned Parenthood in Boise.
LENGTH: Long : 101 linesby CNB