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Breaking South LA's cycle of teen pregnancy


Though the national teen birth rate has dropped to reach record lows, South LA’s teen birth rate continues to be well above the national average and remains the highest in the county.
Testimony from a teen mother of two | Marissa Cardona talks about her two sons, Armando and Damian.



Learning your 14-year-old daughter is pregnant | Mario Cardona didn't know his daughter, Marissa, was pregnant until the night she gave birth. Cardona recounts the events of that night - his fears and disappointment - but he insists he will never turn his back on his daughter.

By Melissah Yang

Fourteen-year-old Marissa Cardona had just finished trying out for her middle school’s soccer team when her water broke.

“Since I didn’t know much, I was confused,” Marissa said. “I thought, ‘Am I sweating?’”

For months, Marissa had kept her small baby bump hidden. She practiced soccer drills with her dad, wore loose clothes and pretended she was still a normal teenager. She hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant because she was too scared.

But then she went into labor. Her mother took her to the hospital in the middle of the night, thinking she was sick. As the nurse took her blood pressure, Marissa felt the baby crown.

“I pushed one more time, and then Armando came out. I was standing up, and my mom caught him. All the nurses came, closed the curtains and just cut me up,” Marissa said. “He was born at three in the morning.”

Marissa said she and Armando’s 14-year-old father, who left when Armando was one, didn’t know about contraceptives like condoms or birth control, a common problem among teens living in South Los Angeles.

According to the CDC, the U.S. teen birth rate has steadily decreased over the past several decades, and in 2011, it declined to a record low of 31.3 births, the lowest rate reported since the 1940s.

But South L.A.’s teen birth rate remains stubbornly high at nearly double the national average, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. And it continues to be the highest in the county, nearly 10 times the rate for the more affluent Westside, which includes Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Malibu.

Local community organizations are fighting to reduce South L.A.’s high teen birth rate, offering teen pregnancy prevention programs both within and outside the classroom. But a neighborhood culture that facilitates a cycle of young teen mothers makes South L.A. one of the toughest areas in the county to avoid teen parenthood.

Marissa, now 20, says she considers herself lucky to have parents who supported her. Her father, Mario Cardona, said he initially struggled with mixed feelings, not sure whether to follow advice from some family members who told him he should put Marissa and her son out on the street.

“I didn’t know how to react,” Cardona, 46, said, looking back at the moment when he first saw his teen daughter with his grandson. “But then I grabbed ‘Mando and then I just hugged my daughter and told her, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. I got your back.’”

Cardona paused, his eyes brimming with tears. “So ever since then, I’ve had her back.”

But he questioned how Marissa could become pregnant since he often took her and his second daughter, Ruby, to pregnancy prevention workshops he taught as a project director at the Girls Club of Los Angeles. When Marissa returned to school after taking a semester off, Cardona brought his grandson to work with him, putting Armando in the child-care center with other children of teen moms.

“It’s been…devastating when you try to help out another teenage mom, but here you go. You have the same issues at your house,” Cardona said.

At Girls Club, Cardona met Executive Director Gloria Davis who oversees the organization’s youth development programs that promote healthy lifestyles for teens living in South L.A.

“The best contraception is education,” Davis said, which is why Girls Club offers a school-based prevention program every semester at Washington Prep High School.

Project Director Jocelyn Nichols, who teaches the eight-week health course, said sex education was more than just covering reproductive health.

“If we just start talking about sex – what it looks like, virginity and celibacy, pregnancy prevention – we don’t get to what kind of goals they have in life and what they want to be,” Nichols said. “It wouldn’t defer them from becoming pregnant.”

But Nichols said many teen mothers have to leave their dreams behind in order to financially support their children. Only half of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by the age of 22, according to the CDC.

“They feel like they have to choose between school and their baby,” Nichols said. “The baby’s not going to give…so they look at right now instead of tomorrow because right now is the baby. Tomorrow, they can’t see.”



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Why South L.A.’s teen birth rate eclipses the rates for the rest of the county remains a mystery to public health officials.

“That’s the $6 million question,” Christine De Rosa, director of the adolescent and school health unit for the L.A. County Department of Public Health, said. “It’s really hard to pinpoint exactly, but it goes along with all other adolescent risk behaviors: poverty, opportunity, jobs and gang involvement.”

De Rosa pointed to the neighborhood where a teen mother lived – rather than age or ethnicity – as the most important demographic to target in order to reduce the teen birth rate in Los Angeles.

“It has a lot to do with where you live,” De Rosa said. “It impacts the resources that are available to you in the community…It’s a bigger issue than just teen pregnancy. It’s a quality of life issue.”

Despite efforts by LAUSD, Girls Club and other community organizations like Planned Parenthood to make condoms available at schools’ nursing offices, underserved communities like South L.A. continue to lack the necessary resources to educate students about safe sex.

According to a study conducted by the county health department, nearly 30 percent of 9th graders surveyed among 12 LAUSD high schools reported having sexual intercourse. When these students graduated four years later, this number more than doubled. And among high school students in the U.S. who reported being sexually active, only 60 percent said they used a condom during their last sexual encounter.

Sonya Negriff, a research assistant professor at the USC School of Social Work, said besides a lack of resources, family dynamics also play a major role in determining a teen’s likelihood in becoming pregnant.

“Being born to a teen parent…or being raised in a single parent household makes teens more likely to engage in unprotected sex and be a teen parent themselves,” Negriff said.

But Mario Cardona and his family didn’t fit that category. He and his wife, Karen, had been happily married for 25 years. Both were in their 20s when they had children.

Though strict with his daughters – often warning them they were beautiful girls whom boys would find attractive – Cardona said he blamed himself for Marissa’s pregnancy. He admitted he wasn’t always around, serving a year in prison for a DUI conviction.

It was during that time that Marissa became pregnant.

“The father figure wasn’t at home,” Cardona said. “I was elsewhere, doing time, and Karen was trying to keep up with the house so they were on their own in a way.” To make up for the time he was gone, Cardona took on a father figure role to his grandson, who affectionately calls him, “Papa.” Cardona supported Marissa and kept her in his home so she could graduate from high school in 2010.

But balancing school and motherhood proved to be tough once again. When Marissa was 19, she became pregnant with her second son, Damian.

“The second time I told my parents I was pregnant, they were mad because they wanted me to beat the cycle,” Marissa said. “You know, every teenager who becomes pregnant, in about five years, they become pregnant again.”

Nearly one in five teen births are a repeat birth for the mother, according to the CDC. Marissa said even though she didn’t plan to become pregnant again in her teen years, she said she felt more prepared because she was older and more mature to handle her pregnancy. And with the help of Damian’s father, Dennis, whom she married this past year, she said the second time around has been easier.

She and her husband plan to one day move out of the garage behind her father’s house and be financially independent. She said she wants to become a probation officer after she graduates from LACC with her criminal justice degree.

But on this Saturday morning, she is "Mom" to her two sons. Five-year-old Armando sits on the floor of his play room, surrounded by hundreds of Hot Wheels cars his mother had bought for him. Marissa leans back on a chair in the living room of her father’s house, feeding baby formula to her hungry five-month-old.

Marissa said she’s not sure whether she will have any more children, saying she sometimes wishes for a daughter. But because she already worries enough about her sons when they become teenagers, the daughter will have to wait.

“Even though I would have the talk with them, kids are still going to do what they want,” Marissa said. “If I were to stay with my children around here – I don’t want it to happen – but they would probably be teen parents too. It’s just common.”