Molly Ivins September 11

AUSTIN — New nomination in the category of most fatuous, pointless and profoundly dumb debate in what we laughingly call the world of public policy: Concerning teenage pregnancy, should we be teaching abstinence to young people or should we be teaching birth control?

My question is: Have any of the people who have managed to make this a burning issue ever talked to a 14-year-old who is pregnant? Why don't they try doing that? These girls don't need lectures on abstinence, and they don't need lectures on birth control. What they need is a life.

If you haven't got a pregnant 14-year-old handy (they're not that hard to find), try any of several new-ish books on the subject in which these girls are interviewed extensively. Melissa Ludtke's "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America" provides dozens of examples.

One of the saddest and most typical stories is Shanika's. She is 24 and has three children, no high school degree, no job or good prospect of getting one, and no husband. Asked what she had dreamed before she had children, Shanika replied, "You know, I really didn't have a dream."

"Teachers and guidance counselors — actually, anyone who spends a good deal of time with poor and unmotivated adolescents — can testify to how hope diminishes in many youngsters as they travel through adolescence," Ludtke writes. "In 1995, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development reported, 'Especially in low-income neighborhoods where good education and jobs are scarce, young people can grow up with a bleak sense of the future.' And hope about one's own future, it turns out, is an often missing but absolutely essential ingredient if sexual abstinence is to be chosen or contraception used. Debbie, for example, had plenty of knowledge about how to prevent a pregnancy, and she had access to the means to do it. What she did not have was the desire and discipline to use what she knew. The hope and motivation ... are so essential."

The profile of these teen mothers is so consistent: daughter of a teen-age mother, raised in poverty, academic failure, abused by a family member, without a trusting connection to any adult, feelings of detached hopelessness. One study by the University of Washington of 535 women who had become pregnant as girls found that 66 percent of them had been sexually abused as children and 44 percent had been forced to have intercourse at some point in their lives. Now, let's see — would the lecture on abstinence or the lecture on birth control have been more helpful in those cases?

Ludtke found more consistency among those who work with teenage mothers; their invariable prescription is that what these girls need, desperately need, is someone who cares about them.

Someone they can talk to. (Shanika uses "talk to" as a synonym for sex, her only approximation of intimacy.) A good role model. Just one adult in whom they feel they can confide. "Maybe if once a month they had someone to take them on a little picnic or ice-skating, just something where they are spending some time together," said one counselor.

And the good news is there are such programs, and they do work. Everything from Big Sisters to special high schools for pregnant girls helps. The programs that seem to work best are the small ones, where the girls get lots of individual attention. Just like magic, they respond to attention.

One of our misconceptions, as it were, about teen pregnancy is that it's an epidemic, a rising tide. Actually, both the rate of teen pregnancy and the total numbers are dropping — and have been for 40 years. The difference is that many fewer teen mothers are married.

By 1994, 76 percent of all births to teenagers happened outside marriage; in recent years, births to unmarried teen mothers have increased faster among whites than among blacks. This is where the two-tier economy comes in.

Ludtke reports: "Hourly wages for young male workers have fallen sharply since the 1970s, as has the ability to secure steady employment, particularly for those with only a high school diploma. The most precipitous drops in wages — and rises in unemployment — have occurred among young men, especially minorities, who have dropped out of high school; many of these men are the fathers of the children of young, single mothers.

"The Census Bureau reported in 1992 that nearly half of full-time workers between the ages of 18 and 24 — the age at which most men become fathers of children born to teenage mothers — were earning less than a poverty-wage level for a family of four. A 1995 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that from 1969 to 1993, the percentage of 25- to 34-year-old men whose salaries could not support a four-person family more than doubled, reaching 33 percent."

Do we think abstinence or birth control is a better answer to this problem?

Reading through the old and not-so-old debates about illegitimate births, and all the efforts to punish unwed mothers by cutting off public assistance or taking their children away (neither worked worth anything), I was reminded of something that former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt said during such a debate in the Texas Legislature. He went to the back mike and announced: "I am not so much concerned about the natural bastards as I am about the self-made ones."

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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