Teen-Age Mothers at Eye of Welfare Storm : Reform: Unwed childbearing is harmful to parents, children and society. But patchwork remedies have failed.

NEW ORLEANS —  A 15-year-old who lives on this city’s gritty South Side said she just didn’t believe that she could get pregnant because “me and my boyfriend had been having sex for three months and nothing happened.”

A 19-year-old honor student at the University of Wyoming at Laramie said she believes that premarital sex is wrong. Still, she gave in to her boyfriend’s pleadings and didn’t use contraceptives because she also thought it couldn’t happen to her. Her baby is due in April.

From inner-city housing projects to middle-class suburban homes, nearly 500,000 U.S. teen-agers have babies annually--the highest adolescent birth rate in the developed world.

They have become the lightning rods in a passionate debate over burgeoning federal welfare payouts, about 90% of which go to fatherless families that most often started with unwed teen-age childbearing.

That caseload continues to grow despite an increase over the past decade in the number of churches, charities, schools and local governments offering programs aimed at preventing teen-age pregnancies and helping young mothers become economically self-sufficient.

But despite these efforts, there is no coordinated, comprehensive prevention strategy to deal with a problem whose chief common denominator is poverty, according to experts on teen-age sexual activity and pregnancy.

Instead, the majority of the nation’s teen-pregnancy programs exist as small, independent, stopgap efforts that deal with teen-agers who have already become parents and are dependent on public and private funding.

“Under the welfare system, you can have a baby, get a check with your name on it, in many states a place of your own, and day care--it’s adulthood by proxy and that is what has to be changed, “ said Barbara Whitehead, vice president of the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank in New York.

Yet “sexual behavior is tightly bound to whatever the dominant local life script is for adolescents,” she said.

“If that script is geared toward getting an education and pursuing careers, you won’t see as many girls having babies and dropping out of school,” Whitehead added. “But if that script is without a prayer of going to college or getting a decent job, then it argues in favor of the immediate psychological rewards of becoming a mother.”

The personal and social impact of unwed teen-age pregnancy, which frequently leads to reliance on federal assistance for survival, is enormous.

From 1985 through 1990, the public costs of Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Medicaid and food stamps related to teen-age childbearing totaled $120.3 billion, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Statistics show that unwed teen-age mothers are at much higher risk of failing to complete school, suffering from serious medical complications--including premature delivery--and earning dramatically lower lifetime incomes than women who give birth in their 20s or later.

Facing these and other problems, such as the inability to afford child care while they work at minimum-wage jobs, a majority of teen-age mothers turn to the federal safety net.

Now, with Republicans having taken control of Congress, there is a move to cut back welfare programs. One of the key initiatives under consideration is dropping unwed teen-age mothers from the dole completely, ending what many call a culture of illegitimacy.

“People disagree about whether welfare encourages illegitimacy,” said Douglas Besharov, a senior policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “but no one claims that it discourages illegitimacy, and that is the goal we want.”

But do teen-agers get pregnant for the welfare checks?

Critics of the GOP plan, such as the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, cite recent surveys showing that 85% of all teen-age pregnancies are unplanned. And while 70% of births to the nation’s teen-agers occur outside of marriage, adolescents account for a smaller proportion of all out-of-wedlock births today than they did in 1970.

Even former defenders of the welfare system concede that teen-age pregnancy often launches a vicious cycle of poverty that entraps the unwed mother and her children. But why, they ask, punish babies for the mistakes of their parents?

The two things everyone can agree on are that unwed teen-age childbearing is detrimental to the parents, children and society, and that the nation’s existing patchwork of short-term and poorly funded programs related to teen-age pregnancy have failed.

“Providing teens with information about abstinence, contraception and their bodies is all for nought if we do not deal with fundamental problems related to housing, education, economics, family problems and whether they will even reach the age of 18,” said Michael Carrera, director of adolescent pregnancy prevention programs at the Children’s Aid Society in New York.

“The newest movement in this field,” he said, “suggests that the best way to work with young people is to provide them with opportunities that increase their desire to go on, that improve their assets so that they truly believe they have a future.”

Carrera helped create north New Orleans’ Kuji Center, a highly touted program nestled between the Mississippi River and the St. Thomas public housing project.

The $300,000-a-year, privately funded program is modeled after a similar effort that Carrera co-directs in New York, serving the young people of Harlem’s mostly African American and Latino communities.

In the Kuji Center’s after-school program, youngsters receive intensive counseling, academic help, job training and sex education that involves the students’ parents whenever possible.

The results are impressive. In a community where school dropouts, pregnant teen-agers and drug abuse are rampant, only three of 121 teen-age girls in the program between 1990 and 1993 became pregnant.

Jerelyn Coleman, 16, said the program has changed her mind about a lot of things.

“I used to think about getting pregnant,” said Coleman, who wants to join the Marines and then seek a career in nursing. “Now I think about the consequences. And if a boy comes on to me, I’m gonna say, ‘If you really love me, you’ll wait until I’m ready.’ I learned that at the Kuji Center.”

In 1992, the public cost of teen-age childbearing in Louisiana was estimated to have been more than $335 million. The same year, about 1% of that amount was invested statewide to prevent adolescent pregnancy.

The vast majority of Louisiana’s teen-age mothers--as in the rest of the nation--are poor and do not see much of a future for themselves. Unlike affluent teens who generally postpone childbearing to go to college and pursue careers, many of these young mothers see no reason to wait.

Others simply fail to use contraception--or believe a baby would fill some void in their lives.

New Orleans welfare recipient Tanner Feast, 19, had a baby out of wedlock a year ago. She recently joined a program that provides counseling and job training to young unwed mothers.

“I can get a job, but I don’t want to work at a fast-food place because my baby is sick with asthma and there’s no way I could afford his medical expenses on a $4.25-an-hour job,” Feast said. “If I go to work, they’ll take my Medicaid card away from me, then what will I do?

“The mistake we made,” she said of unwed teen-age mothers, “was having parents who did not have the time or the knowledge to tell us about responsible sex. Now, we can’t do that with our children either, because we spend all of our time going to school or looking for a decent job.”

At L.B. Landry High School in New Orleans, the school nurse puts out this call on the public address system each month: “Attention! Any young lady who thinks she may be pregnant, please report to the nurse immediately.”

In her office, Patricia Facquet advises pregnant teen-agers--and those entertaining the idea of having a baby--about family and career counseling that is available on campus, along with health education and parenting programs. The efforts seem to be working.

“Our parenting group started with 42 pregnant young women and 10 (teen-age) parents,” Facquet said. “Today, we have 16 pregnant teens and 63 parents,” indicating that the number of teen-age pregnancies is falling while young parents are showing more responsibility.

But similar, multifaceted efforts are rare. In Buffalo, N.Y., there is CHOICE, a 40-week program in which teens learn “refusal skills,” as well as tour local colleges and businesses where professionals provide information on career options and job opportunities.

Alaska is funding a “Just Say Whoa!” media campaign.

In Colorado, the nonprofit West Denver Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative distributes $212,500 annually to a dozen agencies that aim to improve reading and academic skills, set career goals and build self-esteem among vulnerable teen-agers.

Jeanette Sanchez, a director of one of the recipient agencies, said, “Some girls, feeling horribly neglected and abused and without futures, believe a baby will give meaning to their lives.”

Among them is Naomi Valdez, a 14-year-old high school freshman who became pregnant late last year, craving the attention her older sister commanded when she had two children out of wedlock.

“I thought this baby would bring me love, and I still think that,” Valdez said. “But was it a mistake? Yeah. I’m too young. I see a rough time ahead.”