Boyle Heights: A Community Cycle of Teen Pregnancy
National pregnancy rates amongt teenagers, has seen its most significant decline within the last decade but the same is not true for low-income areas where high rates are not experiencing significant decreases. In 2010, it was reported that teenagers between the ages of 15 to 19 experienced an average of 29 pregnancies for every one thousand.
States like California now need to decide how to better combat these rates while also taking into consideration how both schools and communities can help one another.
“I think a big one step is talking to the kids when they are still young because kids are becoming sexually active at younger ages. A lot of people don’t think it’s right to talk to middle school students about it but because of statistics, it shows that you have to talk to the younger population,” said Kelsea Casto who runs the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative in Michigan.
The program is a part health department and focuses on public events, assemblies and monthly meetings where students from surrounding high schools are able to come and discuss various situations that may be experiencing or contemplating while getting advice on how to avoid unplanned pregnancies.
The goal of TPPI is to raise awareness but to also give students the proper knowledge in how to make the best and healthiest decision that is conducive of a bright future.
Statistics and media pundits have both commented that today’s society is over-sexualized which may lend a hand to younger kids experimenting with sexual activity, however, some of the solution lies in the hands of parents.
“Make the relationship between the parents and teens uncomfortable and discuss what’s going on. A lot of teens are uncomfortable talking to their parents about sex and vice versa, a lot of parents are uncomfortable talking to their kids,” said Casto.
Casto considers this discomfort to be a reason why students are taking more risks with their bodies and lives.
“Also, a lot of older generations are oblivious to the fact that kids are becoming sexually active at such a young age and they kind of just want to hide it, they aren’t wanting to admit that it’s happening but it is,” said Casto.
In urban areas, such as Boyle Heights, there is not much of a conversation being had with the youth, instead many of them have become products of what they see and less of what their possibilities may be.
“In urban areas they’ve kind of adapted to the fact that this is what they’re going to do, like this is going to be the choice they make – they expect to do this kind of stuff,” said Casto.
Roosevelt High is one of the local schools in the Boyle Heights area and is coined a “pregnancy hotspot” within the district.
In an effort to decrease the number of teen pregnancies at the school, the Los Angeles Unified School District teamed up with Planned Parenthood to develop an on-campus clinic, which provides contraceptives, sexually transmitted disease testing and pregnancy tests.
“A concern that I have with teens being able to get a hold of birth control emergency contraceptives is that they see it as a means to be more careless.
"These are not health items created to make exceptions for bad or misinformed decisions, they are preventative items and that need to be thoroughly, thoroughly explained to these children because they simply do not get it,” said Evelyn Ray who has worked with Planned Parenthood for nearly 10 years.
Nurse Sherry Medrano, who runs the clinic at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights, says that the school and clinic have both become the target are many protest groups.
Many community members expressed that they do not approve of high school students having access to birth control and emergency contraceptives on-campus. Another possible option could have been an improved curriculum for the districts sexual education program.
“A lot of them talk about abstinence only and that’s just not reality, kids aren’t going to make those choices and if they do it’s going to be a very small portion of them,” said Casto.
With an expresses lack of communication between parent and child, easily accessible condoms and birth control and a poorly developed sex education curriculum it is no wonder that teen pregnancies are still an issue in the area.
However, some teens feel that rates may be high due to other factors.
“My opinion is that teen pregnancy is at a high rate because it’s around that age where you start to become interested in the opposite gender and experimenting, and really while doing that you kind of become emotionally attached.
Getting pregnant is kind of a way of guaranteeing that you’re always going to be apart of their life and keeping them around really,” said Kris Hooks, who has experience in being with a teen mom.
Searching for love and reassuring relationships is easily a part of developing as a person, especially during the teenage years.
“When I found out I was pregnant I felt like I was nervous but at the same time I was happy because I felt like the person I was intimate with and got ßpregnant with showed me the love that nobody had ever shown me before,” said teen mom Naomi Wharton.
It is as if becoming pregnant was not a planned goal but the expectation of a lasting relationship and the love that Wharton never experienced from her family made being pregnant less of a fear.
“My family’s reaction to me being pregnant wasn’t a bad reaction, it was more of a celebration. At my age they had the same thing going on in their life as far as getting pregnant as a teen – they didn’t really know hot to teach me and they can’t be mad at me because they would feel like hypocrites,” said Wharton.
Wharton’s own mother was born to a teen mom, as was Wharton.
“My mom had me as a teen and it hurt her to not be able to give me the things that I needed or sometimes wanted. What’s going to hurt me the most is that I won’t be able to give a child what they need and I really wanted to be the one to stop that cycle,” said Wharton.
The most challenging part in accepting that she too would repeat the cycle of teen moms in her family, is that she had to accept that it was a challenge she would take on alone.
“I didn’t realize that sometimes when you get pregnant that your partner may leave you. I guess I thought that the bond was permanent and that they would always be there. I just didn’t realize it would be such a struggle—it’s going to be such a struggle to take care of this child on my own when I’m a child myself,” said Wharton.
As much of a reality as teen pregnancies are, it is just as important that time be taken to better educate the youth so that they are well-equipped to handle some of the more harsh realities that comes with making adult decisions.
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